We Americans have always seemed, to me, to be a nostalgic people. Maybe my thinking has something to do with the long line of Irish storytellers in my family — even today, the smallest of family events rarely passes without reference to the outlandish history of some long-lost ancestor. But I suspect it has more to do with the fast-paced changes of our own national history. The shifts come so quickly that we rely on hindsight and reflection to tell us the bigger version of our own past.
The 1960s have proved to be a particularly rich vein for modern storytellers to mine; from a dramatic point of view, it makes sense. With everything from the civil rights struggle to the breakthrough of the Beatles to the Kennedy assassinations, there’s no shortage of cultural shifts on which to tie a story. This week, three films coming to area screens do just that.
At Cinemark theaters, the new film Love & Mercy tells the complex story of Brian Wilson, the enigmatic singer and co-founder of the Beach Boys. An artist whose music distilled and defined an era — or at least a thin slice of it — Wilson was also a deeply troubled man who’s struggled with drug abuse and mental illness for much of his life. For Wilson — played here by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) during Wilson’s earlier years, and John Cusack in later scenes — everything was not “Good Vibrations.”
Spanning more than three decades, director Bill Pohlad’s film pinpoints two events that frame Wilson’s story: the production of Pet Sounds, the album that would cement his legend among music lovers for decades to come; and the start of his relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the woman who would help him regain his personal footing when his inner life was threatening to spiral out of control forever. The result is an unconventional look at the dark background that gave rise to some of pop’s brightest songs.
Meanwhile, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst will screen A Walk on the Moon on Sunday at 2 p.m. A 1999 film directed by Tony Goldwyn (best known these days as President Fitzgerald Grant III from television’s Scandal), it stars Diane Lane as Pearl Kantrowitz, a lonely housewife spending the summer at a Catskills resort. With her television repairman husband Marty (Liev Schreiber) tied up in the city — the impending moon landing has resulted in an uptick in repair calls — she finds herself drawn to traveling salesman Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen). When Marty is kept away again by the traffic jams resulting from the nearby Woodstock festival, Pearl ends up going to the festival with Walker in an attempt to recapture the youth she gave up as a young mother.
And finally this week: one of the era’s classic spy films comes to Cinemark on Sunday and Wednesday when the James Bond chestnut Goldfinger (1964) plays in multiple screenings. A film of its time that in so many ways went on to define the genre for films still far in the future, Goldfinger is the Bond film to see if you’re only going to see one. Filled with all the classic tropes that make the series so enjoyable still (including, most famously, the henchman Oddjob’s razor-brimmed hat), it is undeniably ridiculous when viewed through modern eyes, but — like old photos that make us cringe and smile all at once — it is a reminder of what we once were. It’s also a reminder to never be afraid, at any given moment, of showing who we are.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
