Einstein – joker and genius
For an actor who’s portrayed everything from a schizophrenic pianist to a zombie pirate, playing Albert Einstein was no big stretch.
But it took the Oscar-winning Geoffrey Rush a while to realise he was a character actor.
‘‘When I was shooting Pirates of the Caribbean, once I had that big hat on with the feather in it and the monkey on my shoulder, the rest was not brain surgery,’’ he says.
‘‘I had a great script and was working with phenomenal actors. I thought, ‘This is the point’. They’d already offered it to me the year before and I’d turned it down because of cowardice. I thought, ‘This is the character actor’s dream. Have a bash at it.’’’
The same applies to his latest role as one of the 20th century’s most profound thinkers in National Geographic’s Genius which started screening in New Zealand this week.
‘‘From all the great classical writing that’s ever been in the theatre or in the cinema, you have a central protagonist who has to shift ... as events around them push them into better levels of survival or a fresh strategy,’’ says Rush.
‘‘And that happened to Einstein, always, through his life. And [it] was also tempered by the fact that he had a personality that was very anti-authoritarian. He’d given up his German citizenship as a very young man because he didn’t believe in a militaristic state,’’ says Rush, who plays the older Einstein, while the younger is portrayed by Johnny Flynn ( Lovesick).
‘‘He was a glass-half-full kind of guy,’’ continues Rush, who’s now 65. ‘‘He always saw the better side of humanity, but then had to confront the development of atomic weaponry ... So he’s poised very dramatically in the centre of the drama.’’
The series is produced by the famous team, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who are responsible for such films as A Beautiful Mind, The DaVinci Code and Apollo 13.
‘‘When I first read the script I was not only looking at the definition of what is genius. I didn’t want to go down a kind of IQ-intelligence-quotient-path of study,’’ says Rush.
‘‘So, I started doing some private research and just looking into what defined genius. And I came across, fortunately, this very good quote from Schopenhauer – he’s a German philosopher – it’s quite a nice aphorism. He says, ‘Talent is a target’, ‘Talent hits a target correctly’, or something like that. ‘A genius hits a target that no one can see.’ And that meant a lot for me.’’
The Australian actor wanted to portray Einstein as the man behind the scientist.
‘‘As I’m reading it [the script], I’m thinking, I can hear Groucho Marx delivering these lines. And I can see Harpo visualising some of these lines.
‘‘There’s a kind of deep-rooted Yiddish spirit or level of wit that he was obviously very good at because when you see some of the footage of when he first went to America or Britain, and he got off the boat, within seconds he’d have a group of newfound friends or reporters cackling pretty seriously.
‘‘So, his optimism and sparkle is very present in his humanitarian outlook.’’
Flynn thinks that humour was an essential part of the great thinker.
‘‘To see some of the things that in his personal life, with him as a young man – and the tragedies that he went through, and these huge world events, these global events, the two world wars and everything that was going on in Europe in the early 20th century, and his personal stuff – to see the humour in the context of that is really important,’’ says Flynn, 34.
‘‘And that’s not what you know of him as a layman. That’s not what I knew of him before embarking on the project. So, that’s what’s been really cool, is to see the reason ... we find humour in tragic circumstances because that’s the human spirit coming through.’’
Einstein was also naturally witty, says Ken Biller, executive producer and show runner of Genius, which was filmed in the Czech Republic.
‘‘While I’d like to think that we’ve written some clever dialogue for him, some of the cleverest dialogue is dialogue that he wrote for himself because we’ve sprinkled into some of these scripts Einstein-isms; things that he either said or wrote that were really perceptive and often quite funny,’’ he says.
Howard, who directs the first episode, reports that the initial script presented young Albert as a bohemian artist with a maverick sensibility that sometimes thrust him into trouble.
‘‘Sometimes it was his own doings, sometimes it was his own foibles. But very often, it was society. It was old, rigid thinking, and sometimes plain bigotry that was threatening to prevent the world from having what this remarkable individual had to offer.’’ – TNS
Genius is screening on Sky’s National Geographic channel on Mondays at 8.30pm.
The man behind the super brain emerges in a new series on one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers. reports.
Crazy, beautiful songs
Aimee Mann has been typecast as a singer who always sees the dark lining in the silver cloud, and so she doubles down on that reputation by titling her latest album Mental Illness ( Mann’s also got a healthy sense of humour about life and herself, and she writes songs built to outlast any heartache. These are often beautiful songs about being stuck in a rut, the notion that some people’s lives are about endlessly repeating the same mistake expecting a different result. That’s a layman’s definition of mental illness, and Mann’s artfully realised songs suggest that it’s far more common than one might think. It’s among Mann’s sparest, quietest albums and also among her most beautiful. Beyond her conversational delivery, the singer’s background vocals provide a haunting, wordless backdrop that functions like another instrument. – Greg Kot, TNS
Groovy guitar work
Roy Buchanan’s Loading Zone and You’re Not Alone ( are two mid-70s classical albums from one of life’s should-have-been, could-havebeen great rock guitarists. If this album proves anything, it’s that Buchanan was not tied to any style, jumping from blues to jazz to country. And maybe that’s the problem. Without serious direction, these albums feel a little discombobulated, yet Buchanan remains the guitarist most others wanted to emulate. – Colin Morris
Better than middling
Based on the first of four books by Chris Tebbets and James Patterson, Middle School (PG, ) with its subtitle The Worst Years of My Life, is an entertaining slice of Disney Channel-esque subversive comedy that will appeal to both tweens and adults. Although its illustrative breakouts, sibling rivalry and endless pranks invites comparisons to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, it actually more closely evokes the works of John Hughes, especially Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, with its emphasis on ‘‘stopping the fun being sucked out of childhood’’. – James Croot
War disappoints
John Michael McDonagh fails to get anywhere near the heights of his hilarious debut The Guard, in the lessthan-palatable buddy-cop movie War on Everyone (R16, ). Set in Albuquerque, it follows the misadventures of the Glen Campbellloving loner Terry (Alexander Skarsgard) and smack-talking family man Bob (Michael Pena). From the flashy Euro villain and bad-haired henchman, to the hip pop-culture and philosophy conversations, this is a film that desperately wants to be the 2016 equivalent of a Shane Black movie ( Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Unfortunately, The Nice Guys got there first. – James Croot