{"id":22533,"date":"2015-07-06T10:15:32","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T14:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=22533"},"modified":"2015-07-06T10:26:23","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T14:26:23","slug":"movie-review-say-anything-2-the-healing-of-brian-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/movie-review-say-anything-2-the-healing-of-brian-wilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: Say Anything 2: The Healing of Brian Wilson<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brian

Brian plays Melinda his early sketch of “Lick My Love Pump.”<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s a scene early in Say Anything 2: The Healing of Brian Wilson<\/em>, in which John Cusack’s Brian attempts to find the condo of\u00a0his new infatuation and future wife, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) by walking in circles and calling her name up to\u00a0the dozen balconies overlooking\u00a0the courtyard of her complex. I kept expecting Cusack to pull out a boombox and serenade his new infatuation with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” There were some strong scenes in Say Anything 2<\/em>, when the story inexplicably strayed from the middle-aged exploits of our hero, Lloyd Dobler, and zoomed back to the 1960s, to follow a confusing parallel tale of a brilliant, troubled musician during the creation of his\u00a0band’s masterpiece, Pet Sounds<\/em>, but the Dobler-Ledbetter second-chance-at-love scenes, set\u00a0anachronistically around the same time as the original film’s timeframe, could not have been what any fans of the original Cameron Crowe classic were expecting!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

All kidding aside, what were\u00a0John Cusack and director Bill Pohlad thinking by not having Cusack make the slightest effort to adopt any of the mannerisms and Look of mid-’80s Brian Wilson? I didn’t need Cusack to imitate Wilson and wear a bad straight-hair Ken doll wig, to match Brian’s God-gifted natural mane<\/a>, but for the sake of artistic honesty, couldn’t he have picked up on at least a few of his tics: the zoned-out, non-blinking eyes; the talking out of the side of his mouth; the stuttering; the inspiring recurrence of that warm, open All-American smile<\/a>…<\/p>\n

I didn’t want Cusack to tap into those physical tics for shits and giggles, but to tap into the guy’s fucking pain! Paul Dano, an actor who’s specialized in adolescent torment so well for as long as I have seen him onscreen (starting with Little Miss Sunshine<\/em>) that he annoys me, did a FANTASTIC job of pulling Young Brian’s tics and awkward posture into his emotionally rich portrayal. Cusack, on the other hand, makes only the slightest nods toward bad posture. Otherwise, he’s all batting eyes, swooping head nods, and occasional fatalistic asides\u2014all his beloved tricks that eventually charm the ladies and give the dudes hope from Say Anything<\/em>, High Fidelity<\/em>, and the rest of his extensive catalog of romantic comedies. It’s like he showed up on the set and said, “Listen, man, I love Brian and the music, but I’m here primarily to collect a check and to move the love story along. I’m not putting any extra effort into the Brian character. I know Dano’s going to do the heavy lifting, G-man’s going to act like an ass, and Elizabeth will be\u00a0sweet at honey. Let me\u00a0play off her so\u00a0the audience can root for the two kids to get together at the end.”<\/p>\n

\"Those

Those eyes, that mouth…<\/p><\/div>\n

I could get petty and cut him a new one for not bothering to wear a gaudy patterned\u00a0shirt or put on weight (or show off his late-’80s buff body<\/a>); Banks parades through the movie in the most garish ’80s gold-digger fashions, while Cusack ambles around in timeless discounted items from the Gap. There are other angles of criticism that I will investigate through the week regarding this movie, but my main beef was with the dishonesty and sloth of the film’s Healing of Brian segments. More than half of Love &\u00a0Mercy<\/em> could have been excised and made into the updated rom-com Say Anything 2<\/em>. The film made\u00a0no understanding, in the ’80s segments, to explore what made Wilson tick, what made this vivacious younger woman attracted to Brian\u00a0(other than Cusack’s well-worn rom-con\u00a0tics), what Brian’s so-called “friends and family” really made of him… (The Ledbetter character makes a couple of disembodied phone calls to Carl and their mom, but once freed from the clutches of Landy, didn’t Brian go right back to a string of dysfunctional experiences and lawsuits with his brothers and cousins?)<\/p>\n

Along with the dishonesty and sloth of Cusack’s role in this movie, am I a cynical, horrible person for feeling that\u00a0Ledbetter, the real-life version of whom was a consultant to the film, was portrayed as the next manipulative\u00a0coattail rider in Brian’s life? I hope she’s a great person and really has contributed to more frequent bursts of Brian’s warm, All-American smile, but there was little in the film to give her character any substance.<\/p>\n

As my close personal friend and moviegoing mate E. Pluribus Gergely leaned over and said to me, during one of our frequent in-theater conversations (it’s a wonder we didn’t get kicked out of the surprisingly two-thirds full\u00a0theater), “This entire movie should have been an art-house character study featuring young Brian and Murray Wilson. Most of the rest of the cast could have been cut. Just them and the Wrecking Crew gang in the studio.”<\/p>\n