Movie Review: 'Genius'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Genius is about the genius behind the geniuses, one in particular.
If ever there were a concept for a movie that was the opposite of the typical summer offering, it's this work of Genius.
So think of it as an alternative for folks not interested in warm-weather explosive thrillers or animated family films, or just plain tired of them.
If only Genius exhibited more, well, genius.
It's a cerebral biodrama about Maxwell Perkins, played by Colin Firth, who was a longtime, legendary book editor at Charles Scribner's Sons – sometimes described as the most famous literary editor of them all -- where he oversaw work by the likes of Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Michael Grandage, who makes his feature-film directorial debut, is a British actor and theater director working from a perceptive screenplay by John Logan that's based on the 1978 book by A. Scott Berg, "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius."
His approach to this period piece is slow and solemn, befitting the Depression-era setting, appropriately literary given the milieu, and exhaustively detailed.
The primary focus of what is essentially a two-hander is the bromantic professional relationship between Perkins and North Carolinian author/poet Wolfe, played by Jude Law as extroverted, erratic, and rebellious.
But we also get to peek through the Scribner's keyhole at the sensitive, troubled, and alcoholic Fitzgerald, played by Guy Pearce, as well as the brusque, dismissive, suicidal Hemingway, played by Dominic West.
Two women figure prominently in the drama: Perkins' playwright wife, Louise Saunders, played by Laura Linney, with whom Max had five daughters (rendering Wolfe the son he never had); and Aline Bernstein, a melodramatic married woman involved in an affair with Wolfe, played by Nicole Kidman.
Perkins' gift was to be patient but uncompromising while being able to winnow down a mountain of prose, line by line and word by word – sometimes, quite frankly, doing a bit of the writing himself -- but to stop long before the manuscript had become the proverbial molehill.
The reliable Firth plays Perkins as self-effacing, content being behind the scenes rather than in the glare of the spotlight, ever respectful of his gifted writers, and so disciplined and buttoned up in his behavior that he virtually never removes his fedora.
For the most part, Grandage gets solidly understated performances from his talented cast, with the exception of Law, who, however true to the reality of his character he is, is a bit much to take.
And Grandage's recent theater roots probably keep his film from being as cinematic as it might have been.
But the script is intelligent and informed, even when it's difficult to buy all the on-the-nose dialogue coming out of the mouths of all these literary icons.
Genius doesn't try to be electrifying – it's not that kind of movie – and it comes up short in tension and narrative momentum. But it's consistently thoughtful and rewarding for those interested in the literary process.
So we'll copyedit 2-1/2 stars out of 4. Genius may not be a work of genius, but it's an absorbing peek at a genius or two at work.
