Genius

Year 13, Day 248 - 9/5/21 - Movie #3,927

BEFORE: Well, after watching two Westerns this past week, and determining that Westerns reflect the times they were filmed, I starting binge-watching Season 3 of "Miracle Workers", which moved its recurring characters to the Old West, turning them into pioneers along the Oregon Trail.  This just proved my point about Westerns again, because the characters are completely modernized for comic effect, they somehow know what hashtags are and appear very aware of modern social issues.  Anyway, it got very funny around Episode 4, so consider giving it a go.  OK, advertisement over. 

Guy Pearce carries over from "Animal Kingdom", here he plays F. Scott Fitzgerald, so that should be interesting at least.  I had some internal debate over keeping this one here, as planned, or moving it to November, where I've got a whole Nicole Kidman block planned.  It doesn't really matter, whether I watch this one then or now, it's either between two other Guy Pearce films or two other Nicole Kidman films, it's a part of me getting to the end of 2021 either way.  Really, it just comes down to which film ends up on the half-century mark as Film 3,950, and I like the result that occurs when I watch "Genius" tonight a little better, so there you go. 

THE PLOT: A chronicle of Max Perkins's time as the book editor at Scribner, where he oversaw works by Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. 

AFTER: OK, confession time again, when I first scheduled this film after seeing it in the cable listings, I assumed it was about the author Tom Wolfe, who wrote "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Right Stuff", also "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", books that were really indicative of the 1960's through 1980's.  It didn't even faze me that the poster art made it look like it took place in the 1930's, I guess I figured the guy was just older in the 1960's than I thought, and maybe he started his career back in the 1930's, then hit his stride during the hippie era.  

Well, funny story, it turns out there are two authors with similar names, that Tom Wolfe that I knew (1930-2018), and also Thomas Wolfe, who lived from 1900 to 1938. Damn, but that's confusing, I wonder if librarians tend to encounter a lot of clueless readers who mix these two authors up, or teachers assign the books of one author and their students accidentally end up reading the books of the other.  At least when actors have similar names they usually make one change their name to a pseudonym, or use a middle initial like Michael J. Fox and Samuel L. Jackson had to.  I remember David Bowie was born David Jones, but changed his name when he started performing so he wouldn't get mixed up with Davy Jones from The Monkees.  Why didn't the second Tom Wolfe change his name so he wouldn't be mistaken for the earlier, Depression-era author?  

And the earlier Thomas Wolfe didn't write anything that I'm familiar with - I've heard of "Look Homeward, Angel" but I've never read it or even seen a movie based on it.  So now after watching this film, I'll admit I'm a little disappointed that the subject of this bio-pic didn't live on to write "The Right Stuff" or those other books.  But I will say that this movie did some smart things, like focusing equally on Wolfe's editor, Max Perkins.  Since Perkins also worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there's a chance there for a more accessible storyline, and the stunt casting for those roles as well.  I could have used a bit more Guy Pearce, and Dominic West is also good in his brief appearance as Papa Hemingway, seen of course just after catching a giant fish in Key West, it's all very "Old Man and the Sea".  And we learn about F. Scott's wife, Zelda, having a nervous condition and being institutionalized, plus Fitzgerald had to deal with "The Great Gatsby" being only a minor hit novel during his lifetime, I guess it would be a few decades before every high-school English teacher in the country would assign it to their students.  This makes sense, nobody back in the 1920's needed to learn about the 1920's, because they were all soaking in it.  Now it's got the weight of history behind it, and it's important to study that time period, even if we stubbornly refuse to learn anything from it.  Ha ha, tough economic times back then, that couldn't possibly happen again...wait, what was that crashing noise?  

By focusing on the editorial process, this film also managed to avoid some of the biggest clichés seen in films about writers, namely depicting a writer furiously typing away or worse, staring at a typewriter with a blank page in it, the easiest and cheapest way to depict writer's block.  But Thomas Wolfe the Elder didn't seem to have this problem, as Fitzgerald did, he had the opposite problem, he couldn't stop writing.  His latest manuscript would need to be delivered to his publisher in several wheelbarrows full of bundled paper.  I had to google it, reverse writer's block is technically called "hypergraphia", or in the vernacular, "flow".  See, that's classier than "writer's diarrhea" or even "logorrhea". (yes, that's a real word.)  

(The third cheap movie trope in films about writers is to point out that the manuscript is done, and this stack here is the ONLY copy that exists, because writers don't make back-ups for some reason - only the smart ones do - and then have a big gust of wind or a fan blow the stack of papers all over the place.  Thankfully, that doesn't happen here, either.  Props.)

But it takes YEARS to trim down Wolfe's next novel, "Of Time and the River" to a size where it could reasonably be published in one volume without making it impossible to pick up, and during that process the relationship between Wolfe and Perkins became strained, as did the relationships they had with women.  Perkins fought with his wife after missing one too many family vacations, and Wolfe had an apparently complicated relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married stage designer who left her husband to become Wolfe's patron and support system, and wasn't above resorting to threatening suicide just to get him to stop working on the novel and come home for dinner once in a while.  This was back in the day when getting divorced came with great social stigma, especially for a woman leaving her husband for another man, but that still doesn't really explain all her crazy, Bernstein still seemed like a lot for anyone to handle. 

This is a double-edged sword, however, narratively speaking.  Conflict between Wolfe and Perkins, or between Wolfe and his lady friend, even between Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is much more interesting.  But you can then hear the timer ticking, those relationships just aren't going to last if they can't withstand the drama.  It's like when you lean back on a chair's back legs, it's more exciting than sitting with all four legs on the ground, but if you lean back too far, you're bound to fall, and if you don't lean back enough, then what's the point, you'll just fall forward and you're sitting in a boring fashion again.  Or imagine a roller coaster that doesn't have many big falls and turns in the track - but if it has too many, well, that's just dangerous, and I guess the trick lies in finding just the right balance, and the same goes for relationships.

Wolfe died of tuberculosis of the brain (?) a couple years after leaving Scribners for another publisher, but his biggest hits came with Perkins as his editor, so the implication is that perhaps only that man could rein him in and properly trim down his work.  But as with many writers, dying turned out to be a great career move, I'm not sure why more authors don't take advantage of that. I suppose these actors did the best they could with what they were given, but at the end of the day, unless you're a huge fan of "Look Homeward, Angel", there's just not a lot to grab on to here. 

The word (and title) "Genius" has been used quite a bit lately - there's a TV series of the same name that focused on the life Albert Einstein in Season 1, and I was all over that. (Geoffrey Rush as Einstein?  Just try to stop me from watching that...). The second season featured Antonio Banderas as Pablo Picasso, and I was along for that ride as well, only I found it a bit harder to connect the "genius" label to Picasso.  OK, cubism and all that, but was he really a "genius", very smart, in the truest sense of the word?  Then the third season came along, focused on Aretha Franklin, and there I felt they were stretching the concept just a bit too far.  Aretha was a great singer, but does she belong in the same category as Einstein?  I'm just not sure.  Plus the movie "Respect" with Jennifer Hudson was due out a few months later, so I passed on Season 3, even during the pandemic, when I had plenty of time.  

Also starring Jude Law (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Colin Firth (last seen in "A Single Man"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Upside"), Dominic West (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Laura Linney (last seen in "The Dinner"), Vanessa Kirby (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Gillian Hanna (last seen in "Les Miserables" (1998)), Angela Sant'Albano (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Eve Bracken, Katya Watson, Lorna Doherty, Makenna McBrierty, Corey Johnson (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Lucy Briers (last seen in "Emma." (2020)), Harry Attwell, Ray Strasser King, Katherine Kingsley

RATING: 3 out of 10 royalty checks