No spark and muted pathos
Genius Running time: 1hr44min Starring: Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Guy Pearce, Dominic West DIRECTED BY Michael Grandage MICHAEL Grandage’s first feature, Genius, is a classy but dull literary love affair between prominent Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth) and one of his star authors, Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law). A leading Brit stage director lauded on both sides of the Atlantic, Grandage relates to the work of Perkins, who had already launched the careers of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway before encountering Wolfe.
The story of Perkins’s collaboration and friendship with Wolfe remains stubbornly resistant to drama and emotion.
That forces Grandage to lean unduly on two key solutions. One is to crank up Law’s performance to a level that would play to the back rows of a large theatre but becomes wearying onscreen, even if the actor’s vitality is impressive. An exuberant Southerner whose speech is almost as florid as his prose style, Law’s Tom is all physical and mental urgency. He seems to be working even harder because Firth’s Max is so calm, measured and well, dreary. This is a man who only removes his hat in a final scene as his eyes fill with tears, a release in which he’s likely to remain alone.
The director’s other strenuous bid to inject energy into the material is by plastering every scene with music, the recourse of many an anxious filmmaker. Adam Cork is a theatre composer who has worked frequently with Grandage, and his score is almost manic in its efforts to jazz up repetitive scenes depicting the two men hard at work.
Max’s realisation that something extraordinary has landed on his desk after being rejected by every publisher in town is accompanied by Law reading dollops of Proustian prose in voiceover while Firth intensifies his focus on the pages and Cork’s music swells. But the scenes have less life than a lot of audiobooks.
The story’s conflict comes from two principal sources. One is the difficulty of stemming Tom’s output while simultaneously working to distil it. He keeps producing hundreds of pages for his autobiographical novels as Max toils to remove the fat from others.
Then there’s Tom’s lover, Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), a wellheeled, older, theatrical scenic designer who left her husband and family to support him for five years. She becomes a jealous drama queen when Tom’s friendship and consuming schedule with Max take him away from her. Paradoxically though, her most affecting work is in a hysteria-free scene late in the action.
A less robust thread in the drama reveals Max’s guilt over neglecting his wife, Louise (Laura Linney), a frustrated stage actress yearning for glamour, and their five daughters, to nurture his needy man-child author.
Scenes with Fitzgerald (Guy Pearce) and Hemingway (Dominic West) provide contrasting glimpses into the life of the writer, as well as Max’s supportive role with them.
The insurmountable problem, however, is that the story engages only late in the game, once Tom has betrayed his father figure by revising his previous acknowledgment of the role Max played in molding his genius. But perhaps due to the anaestheting effect of most of what’s come before, the central relationship lacks spark and the pathos remains muted. – Hollywood Reporter