Dir. David Leaf, 2004, USA Cast:
Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, Roger Daltrey
In 1966 Brian Wilson, the musical leader of the Beach Boys, was sitting on top of the world. His previous album Pet Sounds had been a huge leap forward (both conceptually and musically) and its creator was basking in its unprecedented commercial and critical success. A gorgeous, otherworldly collection of shimmering classics such as God Only Knows and Wouldn't it Be Nice, Pet Sounds established Wilson at the very vanguard of that white-hot moment in the mid-sixties music scene, when anything seemed possible. Whilst the rest of the Beach Boys toured to rapturous audiences worldwide, Wilson stayed in LA and began work on its even more ambitious follow-up, destined to become the most famous 'lost' album in popular music history: the legendary 'SMiLE'.
With Beautiful Dreamer, long time Wilson associate David Leaf has assembled an efficient and informative documentary examining the SMiLE story, and it's unexpected and triumphant completion 37 years after it was first abandoned. SMiLE began with the best of intentions, as a humorous celebration of an idealised America. Wilson had wanted to create "a teenage symphony to God", but as the sessions became more complex and lengthy, the weight of expectation became too much for this already fragile and sensitive character. The final straw came with the hostile reception afforded this radical new direction by the returning Beach Boys, a cruel betrayal that precipitated a dark journey into mental illness Wilson would suffer from for decades to come. With such fascinating material to work with, it is unfortunate that Leaf's film is as conventional as SMiLE was unconventional. An overly schematic structure covers Wilson's youth and The Beach Boys early career (blighted by the abuse he suffered from his violent and ambitious father), before moving onto the SMiLE sessions from inception to abandonment. The stories behind SMiLE are legion, and most usually tie it inexorably to the breakdown Wilson would soon suffer. What Leaf's film does particularly well is separate these (mainly true) stories from the common misconception that these were markers of Wilson 's mania. Most music fans will have heard these apocryphal tales before: Brian installing a sandpit into his living room, his bizarre recording techniques (parts of Good Vibrations were recorded in an emptied swimming pool; his insistence the orchestra wear fire helmets during Mrs O'Leary's Cow - and the subsequent factory fire Wilson was convinced the music was responsible for). In extensive interviews with Wilson's mid-sixties inner circle, we see this outlandishness more as mischievous good humour, encouraged by his like-minded contemporaries, rather than full-on drug fuelled psychosis. And while much contextual detail is provided by the likes of David Anderle, lyricist Van Dyke Parks, and Wilson himself, there is also a rash of well-known talking heads, delivering platitudinal sound-bites that offer little by the way of insight. A particularly irritating device Leaf employs is the use of onscreen quotes on the nature of art from the likes of Aristotle, Da Vinci, Dylan and Van Gogh. We don't need this to tell us that Wilson is a genius: we only have to listen to the music he was creating (such as the extraordinary clip of Wilson's solo performance of Surf's Up taken from Leonard Bernstein's 1967 documentary on modern pop music - a truly haunting and beautiful treasure from the archives). Where this documentary really comes into its own is in its final third, which chronicles the reworking of the SMiLE sessions for a planned concert at London's Royal Festival Hall. His great unfinished work had cast a long shadow over Wilson during the intervening years, and mere mention of it could conjure deep-seated attacks of anxiety. The sight of a middle-aged, haunted Wilson during early vocal rehearsals, clearly shaken by the associations the complex harmonies conjure up for him, are as poignantly heartbreaking as they are compelling; as are the scenes backstage before the debut performance, where Wilson, paralysed with nerves, is reassured by Paul McCartney. Ending with a truly cathartic performance of Good Vibrations (surely one of the most ambitious pop songs ever recorded), there is a real sense of relief that Wilson has conquered this demon from his past and finally received the ecstatic audience response he had always deserved. Gus Alvarez |
