Passion between lines in bromance of literary lions
When you make a film about a famous editor, you don’t want to waste words. Genius opens with three: “A true story.” No “based on” or “inspired by” for this biopic. Which I suppose means that Scribner’s editor Max Perkins (Colin Firth), took his hat off only once between 1929 and 1938. That’s certainly how the movie shows it.
An almost exclusively British/ Aussie cast brings the story to life, and the story is a bromance for the ages. After a dynamic opening sequence to show us how electrifying editing is — Slash! Underline! Stet! — we find Perkins absorbed in a new manuscript, O Lost, by some chap named Thomas Wolfe. (It would eventually be published as Look Homeward, Angel.)
A long pan across the bookshelf behind his desk — director Michael Grandage isn’t leaving anything to chance — reveals that Perkins has worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, so you know if he likes something it must be good. When he finally meets the author (Jude Law), his reserved manner strikes sparks with the volatile, almost couchjumping Wolfe.
This causes problems at home for both men, however. Perkins’ wife, Louise (Laura Linney), an aspiring playwright, finds her work overshadowed and all but ignored when Wolfe comes to dinner, though his half-Southern-gentleman, half-roguish manners endear him to the family’s five daughters.
More problematic is Wolfe’s married lover, Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), an older woman and a theatre set designer whom he awkwardly introduces as “my Jewess.”
When Wolfe’s second novel arrives in three huge crates and has to be whittled down to something that can fit between two covers, the two men start spending all their time together. Aline’s burning jealousy threatens to immolate all of them.
There are a few secondary characters: Guy Pearce shows up as F. Scott Fitzgerald, with Vanessa Kirby overplays the fragile Zelda; and Dominic West has fun as Ernest Hemingway, calling Wolfe’s second book, Of Time and the River, “crap.”
But for the most part it’s all Perkins and Wolfe.
The film looks great — all those rain-slicked New York streets and marvellously musty brownon-brown literary offices — but lacks a beating heart. There is plenty of genius on display, but the film, sadly, never comes close to being the equal of its subjects.