GENIUS (2016)
Directed by Michael
Grandage
Summit Entertainment,
104 minutes, PG-13
★★★★
Genius is a very
good film almost nobody has seen. It explores the relationship between Thomas
Wolfe (1900-38) and Scribner's editor Max Perkins (1884-1947), with an eye
toward making us consider which of the two is the titular character
The Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) of this film is not the contemporary writer
of the same name, rather the novelist of Look
Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the
River. Scribner's published both. (Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again appeared three years after his death and
was published by Harper & Row.) The phrase "burst onto the scene"
is usually a metaphor, but it comes close to being literal in the case of the
mercurial Wolfe. At heart Wolfe was a poet from whom stunning imagery poured
forth in torrents. We see Wolfe scribbling lines at pencil-snapping speed and
in quantities that filled wooden crates. And what beautiful lines they
were–golden words flaring like a Rimbaud illumined by booze, jazz,
and adrenaline. Wolfe's problem, though, was that he
sought to be a novelist, not a poet. Every publisher in New York declared his
first novel unreadable and unpublishable—except Scribner's.
Max Perkins (Colin Frith) saw uniqueness and an authentic voice
in the manuscript that became Look
Homeward, Angel. He admired every word, but knew it was like a painting of
a sumptuous banquet none could consume. He worked with Wolfe to trim 66,000
words from a manuscript that ran 544 pages when it was finished. (What is
60,000 words? Over 260 pages!) If you think that's long, Of Time and the River is nearly 900 pages, and Perkins cut that one
even more. The collaboration scenes between the pacific Perkins and the volcanic
Wolfe are one of the stronger filmed versions of the clash between pragmatism and inspiration since the Salieri/Mozart showdowns in Amadeus. The film also does a wonderful job of showing how their
working relationship evolved into a father/son substitute and the toll it
took on their other relationships: Wolfe's with live-in mistress/costume
designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), and Perkins' with his wife, Louise (Laura
Linney) and their five daughters.
Genius also
displays how the tortured side of that status plays out. Max is so buttoned
down that he wears his hat even when working or eating dinner with his family;
Tom is driven to write–and to self-absorption, egotism, boorishness, and
self-destruction. Law plays him as the sort of person you both love to see arrive–and
leave. Of the two performances, Frith's is by far the superior. Did you ever
want to be someone you know you can't be? Every now and then? Imagine if you
felt that all the time. Frith is a man of discipline and control, but we also see him crawling inside his own skin. Law's performance is manic—a bit
like Wolfe was reputed to be–but it also lapses into histrionics. Although they
are not central characters, Kidman is icy and tart–she's wounded, but refuses
to be a victim. Linney walks the fine line between devotion, frustrated
ambition, and quietly exercised power. Guy Pearce and Dominic West appear in
strong cameos as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway respectively.
Mainline critics savaged this film, but they fixated on the
film's muted tones and the stage-like nature of the scrip, and ignored the
subtle probing of the creative process and the myriad folds within the genius
mind. Sometimes it amazes me how intellectuals fail to recognize the intellect
of others. Thomas Edison once quipped, "Genius is one percent inspiration
and ninety-nine percent perspiration." This film shows that and suggests
that the entire formula need not reside within one soul.
Of course, critics are also renowned for hating editors,
whom they view as bureaucratic ciphers whose job it is to strip all the color
and magic from prose. Numerous literary scholars have hurled that charge at
Perkins. What arrogance! Did Wolfe make Max Perkins? Hardly. Here's a shortlist
of award-winning writers he also edited:
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Marjorie Rawlings, Alan Paton, Erskine Caldwell,
James Jones…. Is it telling that Wolfe didn't have another best-selling novel
in his lifetime? That very few have read his original manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel? That he mostly
wrote novellas and short stories after breaking with Perkins? Probably.
Give this one a try. It's not a perfect film and perhaps it would
work better as a play. But, as readers of Wolfe always said of his work: it is unique.
Rob Weir
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