The Wolfe pack is on the prowl
In the 1920s, American novelists were the rock stars of their day.
‘They were often incendiary figures,’ said John Logan, who has written the screenplay for Michael Grandage’s terrific film Genius, which tells how the celebrated book editor Maxwell Perkins helped Thomas Wolfe with his tomes Look Homeward, Angel and of Time And The River.
Grandage told me at the Berlin Film Festival: ‘When you set Wolfe alongside Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he’s an extraordinary figure who sold masses of copies.’
Today, Wolfe’s rather fallen from fashion in academia, but then, according to Logan, ‘he was the Keith Moon of literature’. He added: ‘He was a shockingly violent rebel people couldn’t take their eyes off.’
In Genius, Colin Firth is the patient Perkins who went through thousands of pages of Wolfe’s man- uscripts. Firth offers a marvellous portrait of calm opposite Jude Law, whose Wolfe is a force of nature.
Added to the mix is Laura Linney as Louise Sanders, Perkins’s wife, and nicole Kidman (in one of her best roles) as Aline Bernstein, the stage designer who left her husband and children to be with Wolfe.
There’s a fabulous moment towards the end of the film when Bernstein, totally exasperated with Wolfe, says to him: ‘You have no idea what I had to go through to get where I am now . . . so I can look at you and feel nothing.’
Genius is Grandage’s screen directorial debut and the first picture from the company he runs with partner James Bierman.