By William Wolf

GENIUS  Send This Review to a Friend

The literary importance of the subjects involved, author Thomas Wolfe and editor Maxwell Perkins, makes the film, directed by Michael Grandage and written by John Logan from A. Scott Berg’s biography “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” interesting on its face. But if Wolfe as frenetically portrayed by Jude Law was as overbearing and obnoxious as depicted, one would be hard-pressed to see how anybody could have ever spent more than a few minutes with him.

We see Wolfe thrilled when his “Look Homeward, Angel,” after rejection just about everywhere, impresses Colin Firth as Scribner’s renowned editor Perkins, who has edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. So begins a relationship that tries Perkins’s patience. Wolfe is shown overwriting enormously, with cutting essential to getting the work honed and published, always painful to an author.

The film captures the look of 1920s and 30s New York. We briefly get to meet Dominic West as Hemingway, Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald and Vanessa Kirby as Zelda Fitzgerald. We get to know theater scenic designer Aline Bernstein, impressively played by Nicole Kidman. Having adopted Wolfe as her protégée and lover, Bernstein is furious as Wolfe is shown having little regard for her career and totally self-absorbed, leading to the inevitable histrionics and clashes.

Laura Linney has a thankless role as Perkins’s wife, who has her beefs about the time he puts in at long hours of work at their home in Connecticut instead of spending more time, as she would like him to, with her and their children. Firth plays Perkins mostly with understated, stoic dedication.

The main focus is on the ups and downs in the relationship between Perkins and Wolfe, who died tragically at the age of 37. “Genius” steadily commands interest because of the issues and personalities involved, but it grows exasperating for Law’s overacting and the soap opera vibes the film generates. A Roadside/Lionsgate release. Reviewed June 10, 2016.

  

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