MISTERS WRITE
Film explores the bromance between a famous author and his famous editor
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 couch-jumping Wolfe. I didn’t notice a periodic table in the scene, but I wouldn’t put it past the movie. Chemistry! They have chemistry!
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 overplaying 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, as the two men walk the streets of New York, visit jazz clubs, knock back hard liquor, and tussle over adjectives. In the film’s most overtly romantic moment, Wolfe shouts out “I love you Max Perkins!” in a crowded train station.
John Logan (Hugo, Spectre), adapting the screenplay from A. Scott Berg’s biography of Perkins, inserts regular problems for the two men to overcome.
There’s Wolfe’s increasingly destructive drinking, and Perkins’ crisis of faith, when he wonders: “Are we making books better or just making them different?”
The resulting film looks great but lacks a heart. Or rather, it wears the heart it has on its sleeve, not trusting viewers to understand the meeting of the minds.