QUOTE of the DAY: THOMSON on BANKS

'We know from the way she grips her clipboard and pulls her skirt down a half inch when Brian wants to sit in the Cadillac with her with closed doors that she understands how easily a blonde Cadillac saleswoman with a buttered look that might be a Beach Boys girl twenty years later can be stereotyped. Her every gesture is decent, anxious but friendly, and every one of them is as telling as the astonishingly right clothes she wears. (Costumes by Danny Glicker.) Melinda is not rich.  She could not afford her own Cadillac, even if she drives one for work. She has clothes that are pretty, neat, stylish but budgeted and they speak to a woman of forty-one who has not had the kindness and hope drained out of her yet, and who is determined not to look fast or easy.  "Love & Mercy" is an old-fashioned film, I know, about a woman saving a troubled man, not simply because she loves him, or likes his music, but because she possesses a nuanced detailed power of sympathy that waits for someone who needs rescue and who has taken up the odd challenge of selling Cadillacs as a way of finding him.  There is something of Doris Day with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" here, or of Elisabeth Shue with Nicolas Cage in "Leaving Las Vegas."  We are not accustomed to such generosity, or to stories that place so much value in love or such belief in rescue. Melinda could have been a sentimental stooge. She could have been a mere sexpot or a bimbo. But she has the moral force of Cary Grant saving Ingrid Bergman in "Notorious," and it comes from the assurance with which Pohlad knows he only needs to photograph Melinda’s face thinking about Brian and the fairytale ordeal in which she must overcome the dread spirit of Eugene Landy. Her scenes are with Cusack (who is brilliant) and the chemistry in which their two ardent but wounded and uncertain faces dip closer together is deeply touching.' — David Thomson on Elizabeth Banks in Love & Mercy