A documentary about Brian Wilson tries to understand the legend, but the legend has checked out.
A documentary about Brian Wilson tries to understand the legend, but the legend has checked out.
T alking to Brian Wilson is a strange experience. You’ll never meet a more ingenuous celebrity. He’s wide open to all inquiries, but there’s a void there that neither he nor anyone else can illuminate. He’s the Rain Man of pop.
Building a documentary around recent conversations with Wilson as he drives around L.A. wasn’t likely to yield much, and doesn’t, in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which is being released in theaters and via video on demand. It’s not a film that has anything fresh to offer longtime fans, who will have heard almost all of these stories before, but it does give a sense of what it might be like to hang out with Wilson today. That sense is largely . . . frustration. The man speaks like a toddler, albeit a toddler who has done a lot of LSD and coke.
Nor is the new film the place to start for those who don’t know the whole Wilson story; much better options are the 1995 documentary Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times or the 2014 feature Love & Mercy, which focused heavily on Wilson’s mental breakdowns and starred Paul Dano and John Cusack as Wilson at different stages.
Directed by Brent Wilson (no relation to his subject), Long Promised Road leans heavily on scenes in which Rolling Stone writer Jason Fine drives Wilson around greater Los Angeles, trying and failing to get meaningful reflections out of him. Fine takes Wilson back to Hawthorne, where he grew up. A plaque marks the place where the boyhood house Brian shared with his brothers Dennis and Carl once stood. Wilson’s reaction? “It doesn’t look the same. Looks a little different.” And that’s about how deep the conversation goes at other points on the Beach Boy’s journey.
As fans are aware (but is barely mentioned in the movie), Wilson blames overindulgence in LSD for damaging his brain, and he also suffers from schizoaffective disorder. Voices in his head say horrible things. He is a hollow shell, and has been for decades. So the scenes of him composing new songs and singing off-key are pitiful and feel somewhat exploitative, though Wilson says he enjoys performing.
Reviewing aspects of the legend, such as Wilson’s famous mid-Sixties habit of writing songs barefoot at a piano placed in a sandbox, Fine coaxes Wilson to talk about such things but runs into a wall every time. “I don’t know, I just wanted to have a sandbox,” Wilson says now.
When Fine brings up Brian’s relationship with his brother Dennis, the alcoholic drummer who got drunk and drowned in 1983, it yields this exchange:
“You were really close friends with Dennis.”
“Because we snorted cocaine together!”
The movie might have been better off if it had just tuned in to the strange frequencies of Wilson’s obsessions and let him riff on those. I enjoyed some of Wilson’s crazy asides: “‘What a Fool Believes’ — you know that song by the Doobie Brothers? Scares the hell out of me.” I wish the editors of the movie had left in more of this kind of wonderfully weird chatter.
To fill out the running time, the director brings in the usual archival footage as well as interviews with music-industry vets, all of whom recertify for those who haven’t heard it yet that Wilson is one of pop’s rare geniuses. As everyone has been saying for decades. Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, and especially the producer Don Was (who directed the 1995 Wilson documentary) offer a few interesting observations. With a combination of bafflement and delight, Was sits at a mixing board trying to break down some of Wilson’s intricate tracks into their component parts: Is that a flute on reverb?
John’s comments on how he cribbed some ideas from Wilson (and how the Californian once tried to sell him his piano) are informative, and Springsteen does a very fine job explicating the sorrowful undercurrent of Wilson’s best records. Springsteen could have been a first-rate rock critic, and it’s a shame he threw his life away on a less important profession.
Notably absent from the list of interviewees are family members and Paul McCartney, with whom Wilson had an artistic rivalry that helped define the Sixties. But at least Nick Jonas checks in with his thoughts. Hang on, why are we listening to Nick Jonas talk about Brian Wilson? I have no idea.
