Mark Reviews Movies: BRIAN WILSON: LONG PROMISED ROAD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2021

Brian Wilson, one of the founding members and the major creative force of the Beach Boys, rides in a car with one of his friends. That's the premise of Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, a different kind of biographical documentary from director Brent Wilson (who's not related to the film's subject).

It's a simple but fairly ingenious idea, really, and the fact that the film's central concept arose out of necessity doesn't make it any less effective. Wilson, the musician, has struggled with mental health issues for most of his life, having been diagnosed with both schizoaffective and bipolar disorders. Surely, the other Wilson, the director whose professional credits are littered with music-focused projects, would have loved to sit down with his subject for a lengthy conversation about the Beach Boys, the singer/songwriter/composer's personal life, and his continued creative and professional success.

That wasn't to be, though. The technically former but officially eternal Beach Boy doesn't handle situations such as the one the director proposed well. He's regularly anxious and uncomfortable and, as he says several times over the course of this documentary with an almost child-like honesty, scared.

The man, who has overcome so much professional overshadowing and so many personal challenges, doesn't seem ready, willing, or able to admit that he's one of the most respected and beloved musicians in the history of popular music. That trait partially comes from humility and modesty, for sure, but it's mostly because he is constantly anxious, uncomfortable, and scared. He hears voices, telling him awful and degrading things, and there are moments here, in which Wilson sits in silence with his eyes evading contact with anyone, that we sense those voices.

In other words, Wilson sitting down with a filmmaker and going through his life story—filled with so much accomplishment, yes, but also so much pain—wasn't going to happen. The director devised an easy but clever solution: He would enlist Jason Fine, a music journalist who covered and interviewed Wilson starting in the late 1990s, to do the work of actually talking to the musician.

The two have become friends in the ensuing years, even though it probably seemed unlikely when they initially met, considering the first time the journalist interviewed Wilson. Fine recalls that Wilson suddenly excused himself and left the room. The reporter found him in the kitchen, just staring into the open refrigerator. Wilson said he got scared, but since then, he doesn't get scared around Fine. Sitting at a diner, one of the musicians regular stops when he does go out, Wilson says he finds his friend's voice to be a comfort. Later, at the same diner, he notes that he might have made a new friend in the director, which is definitely saying something. He hasn't felt that way about a stranger since he met Fine.

At this point, one might be wondering when the biography of Wilson's life and career might actually arrive in this documentary, but if one is looking for the kind of straightforward telling that has become the staple of biographical documentaries, that won't be found here. The film is mostly a series of conversations, in which, yes, Wilson and Fine do discuss the former's life—as much as he's willing to tell, which, admittedly, isn't too much.

The director, using archival footage and interviews, fills in the blanks, but the blanks themselves become an essential part of understanding Wilson on a deeper, more empathetic level. Fine allows them to happen in his interview process, and the filmmaker lets us see them in the finished documentary.

Sometimes, Wilson will say what was happening during those silences, such as when he announces that learning about the recent death of a colleague "absolutely broke" his heart, but others, such as when he sits in a recording studio listening to a song with an agonized look on his face, remain a mystery of generally known but specifically unknowable pain. The director uses that latter moment to add the voice of Wilson's father, who was the Beach Boys' manager in the band's early years, yelling at his eldest son in another recording studio decades ago. The voice in Wilson's head might not sound like his controlling and abusive father, but surely, the words and sentiments he hears must be similar, if not exactly the same.

The stories here don't make up the stuff of detailed or even chronological biography, and that, really, is for the better. It feels like a natural conversation, arising from Wilson's choices for music to accompany his multi-day drive with Fine to various houses and other stops from Wilson's past. Fine offers a lot of loaded prompting, which we quickly realize is a requirement for talking to his quiet and reserved friend, but since Wilson is prone to giving single-sentence or just one-word answers to many questions, we're even more engaged when the musician actually does start to talk more and more openly.

Wilson, the director, also offers a series of talking-head interviews, with the likes of Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Linda Perry, and others, and there's an admirable specificity to what their commentary provides. Nick Jonas, for example, has some insight about the impossible expectations a man like Wilson must have felt the need to meet. Musician/producer Don Was takes us through the layers of harmony and instrumentation in "God Only Knows," leaving him—and us—stunned at how a tune so seemingly simple can be so complex beneath the surface.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road knows and admits that it—and we—can never fully know the depths of its subject's own life, talent, and troubles. The film does, though, get us closer to them and, more importantly, to the man himself.

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