Bri­an Wil­son: Long Promised Road

In the almost half-cen­tu­ry since Pet Sounds explod­ed all notions of what pop could do and be, the leg­end of its chief archi­tect Bri­an Wil­son has become as well-known as the melody to any of his songs. The (beach) boy genius whose prodi­gious musi­cal acu­men earned him com­par­isons to Mozart before he’d left his teenage years wasn’t cut out for the psy­cho­log­i­cal demands of his suc­cess, and buck­led under the pres­sure placed upon him first and fore­most by himself.

As he rose to the top of the busi­ness, an exact­ing com­bi­na­tion of anx­i­ety, depres­sion, schizoaf­fec­tive dis­or­der, and drug use sent him retreat­ing into the sand­box of his mind to com­mune with his wound­ed inner child. After years of reclu­sion and insta­bil­i­ty, he’s got­ten back on an even keel in mid­dle age, but his chron­ic shy­ness per­sists in the inter­views that yield lit­tle more than clipped answers of one or two sen­tences rehash­ing mat­ters of pub­lic record.

And so the new doc­u­men­tary from Brent ​“No Rela­tion” Wil­son arrives with the promise of a more can­did, inti­mate look at a man reluc­tant to bare the inner­most parts of him­self. To ease Brian’s nerves, Brent struc­tures the film as a dri­ve down mem­o­ry lane with an easy­go­ing chauf­feur, as Rolling Stone edi­tor Jason Fine (a reg­u­lar inter­view­er of Bri­an, at one point tapped to cowrite his auto­bi­og­ra­phy) shut­tles his pal around SoCal loca­tions rel­e­vant to his past.

Though they’re aim­ing for a casu­al, con­fes­sion­al tone in the vein of the visu­al­ly iden­ti­cal Come­di­ans in Cars Get­ting Cof­fee, the def­er­en­tial terms of their pro­duc­tion just allow Bri­an to shrug off all but the most com­fort­able soft­ball inquiries. Every time Fine prods him about some­thing with rev­e­la­to­ry poten­tial — his reac­tion to the ear­ly surges of press, dis­cord with­in the group, real­ly any opin­ion-based query — he briefly recalls an incon­se­quen­tial anec­dote from the peri­od in ques­tion and set­tles back into his seat.

There’s no talk of Beach Boys mem­ber Mike Love, or the many acts of pas­sive and active aggres­sion that have sowed a bit­ter enmi­ty between him and Bri­an. We hard­ly get any self-reflec­tion on the state of his lega­cy, the only sug­ges­tion of whether he’s fond or wist­ful about these chap­ters of his life evi­dent in his reac­tions. When Fine stops by the for­mer home of Brian’s late broth­er Carl, he stays in the car and has a pri­vate cry while Fine gets out to give him a moment.

The pussy­foot­ing that’s earned Fine entry to Brian’s inner cir­cle also bars him from get­ting any­thing mean­ing­ful dur­ing their inter­view. His half of the stilt­ed, halt­ing back-and-forth often slips into the awed obvi­ous­ness of a fan; Bri­an will men­tion ​“Good Vibra­tions” or ​“Cal­i­for­nia Girls” and Fine will mut­ter ​“that was huge, yeah,” in the approx­i­mate tenor of Chris Farley.

To a par­tial extent, Brian’s with­drawn tem­pera­ment can’t help but reveal the per­son he’s grown into, his terse shy­ness telling on itself. We see that he’s in a weak­ened state despite his self-pro­claimed good health, unable to walk with­out clutch­ing onto the arm of an escort. While hav­ing lunch at a din­er, he men­tions off­hand that he feels like he hasn’t talked to a real friend in three years, a shat­ter­ing divul­gence he nonethe­less makes in an unaf­fect­ed voice obscur­ing his emotion.

Far from the all-access por­trait it would like to be, Brent’s film still man­ages to show what it looks like when some­one avoids intro­spec­tion at all costs. We may nev­er ful­ly know who Bri­an Wil­son is, but in his resis­tance of that know­ing, we gain clar­i­ty on a cru­cial plank of his lat­ter-day persona.