For his portrait of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, filmmaker Brent Wilson gathers the usual tools of the trade: informed and impassioned talking-head testimonials and a rich selection of stills and clips from public and personal archives.
Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road could be considered the third piece in an accidental trilogy, after Don Was’ concise and soulful 1995 doc, Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, and Bill Pohlad’s exquisitely nuanced 2014 biopic, Love & Mercy.
There’s a gentle, therapeutic calm to Fine’s voice — no small thing for Wilson, an against-the-odds survivor and an artist with an uncommon connection to the auditory world.
Working with 70 hours of these driving sequences — and, no doubt, long stretches without a word of conversation — the director and editors Hector Lopez and Kevin Klauber have crafted something compelling, ever attentive to Wilson’s moods, anxieties and joys, to the way he listens to the songs and to the way he answers Fine’s questions with a childlike simplicity.
Of the other band members, Al Jardine appears briefly and cousin Mike Love is seen in vintage clips but goes unmentioned, as do the band’s various legal and personal disputes — not surprising given that Brian Wilson and his wife are executive producers of the doc.
As that 57-year-old clip makes clear, the idea of Southern California that Beach Boys songs celebrated, a place of youth and cars and surfing, was exotic to the rest of the midcentury world.
Passionate and eloquent, the musicians and producers interviewed for the film don’t merely explain why Wilson’s music matters; they reveal the life-changing feelings of discovery that it stirred in them.
Wilson himself may not be interested in explaining his peerless talent as a songwriter, arranger and master of the studio, but he’s still making music — and touring more than ever.
And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds: It’s the ache of the greatest forms of pop music, the intensity contained in the smoothest, most polished and seductive melodies.