Genius dir. by Michael Grandage (review)

I admit that I had an extremely favorable predisposition toward the 2016 film Genius, directed by Michael Grandage and adapted by screenwriter John Logan. For one thing, I was looking forward to the adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), since Maxwell Perkins was such a seminal figure in American literature, guiding luminaries including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and, most importantly for this film, Thomas Wolfe. I wanted to see how Grandage would visually dramatize the most difficult of subjects: the life of the (literary) creative mind. It is always hard to transfer the page to the stage, and since the great pleasure of these authors is in their use of language, I wondered how this film would avoid too many scenes of writers sitting in front of typewriters or typed pages—not exactly the stuff of high drama.

In addition, Grandage, whose very impressive background is primarily in theater, had directed Logan’s play Red (2009), which focuses on the intense and complicated painter Mark Rothko. The 2009–10 production, starring Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant Ken, premiered in London before heading to Broadway. Red is a brilliant work that I saw in Houston, not so far from the Rothko Chapel, a major landmark holding the abstract expressionist’s large canvases that changed how many thought about visual art, and channeled the artist’s frustrations into large, striking, and colorful canvases that defied dismissal. But depicting Rothko lavishing paint on huge canvases while waxing angry and philosophical about life and art on stage has an immediacy that worked well and kept audiences on the edge of their proverbial seats as they saw an exasperated and often cruel Rothko furiously create his massive images. Red won six Tony awards, including Best Play and Best Director. But translating visual art to a visual medium is easier than translating the life of the literary mind—so much of which has to be understood on the page. Watching an author’s life being dramatized often pales in comparison to the words the author produced that inspire interest in that life in the first place.

However, I still had high hopes for this film as Colin Firth was playing Perkins, and ever since he played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I pretty much have watched him avidly in all of his films. But in spite of this perfect storm of heightened anticipation, Genius may hold the most fascination for those with a vested interest in the lives of the artists Perkins worked with, particularly Thomas Wolfe, the main focus of the film. For others, the high drama of Perkins cutting Wolfe’s literary excesses or marking a page might be hard to sustain interest in, particularly with Firth’s quiet and understated portrayal. The film itself feels dark and dreary—almost sepia-toned—and the slow pace of the narrative requires a lot of patience, even from those with a high curiosity level about the writers that Perkins discovered, mentored, or edited during his distinguished career. It is a long 104 minutes, even if you care what is happening. I like watching Firth, and one can see how he struggles with decisions both professional and personal, but his performance is so restrained that he makes Perkins out to be more boring than he deserves to be portrayed as being. There is a moment when Perkins wonders if editors actually improve the works of their writers, or just make their books “different.” Ah, well. Too late to think of that after all that cutting of Wolfe’s baroque and profligate drafts.

The crux of the film centers on the quasi-father-son relationship between the reserved pragmatist Perkins and the dramatic and excessively romantic Wolfe, Perkins’s most challenging author. Jude Law seems to overact (as if he were on stage, rather than on the screen), which further emphasizes Firth’s quiet performance. After Wolfe is rejected by all...