Genius - A Sea of Words and Thomas Wolfe

skizzerflake

skizzerflake

Audioholic Field Marshall
When I saw that this was coming, I was intrigued. On the one hand, it’s a movie that portrays my 3 favorite writers, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, along with their Scribner’s editor, Max Perkins. Most of the movie centered on Wolf and his relationship with Perkins. On the other hand, Flixter ratings are below 50, usually a dead zone for movies. Well, we decided to do it anyway, and I have to say that it’s intriguing.

In case you were not paying attention in American Literature class, Thomas Wolfe was a maniacal novelist in the 20’s - 30’s, a fire hydrant of amazing but completely unrestrained prose. His writing was amazing, but there was SO much of it. On one occasion, he presented his publisher with a million word novel, on another, 5000 type written pages delivered in several cartons. Wolfe was, in short, a wild man and a supernova of verbal energy. His editor, Max Perkins managed to work with Wolfe to whittle down his tomes into something that could actually be published and read. Genius is a fictionalization of that relationship.

Right from the start, Genius is odd. It’s a completely British movie, with nearly all British actors, filmed at Pinewood Studios in UK and directed by Michael Grandage. My only other experience of Grandage was with The Madness of King George, a fine but obscure film. Colin Firth costars as Max Perkins, with Jude Law as the hyperactive Wolfe. Nicole Kidman appears as Aline Bernstein, Wolfe’s married girlfriend and sometimes financier, Laura Linney as Louise Perkins (Max’s wife), Guy Pearce and Venessa Kirby as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Dominic West as Hemingway. Accents are all over the place, with Firth generally sounding British and Law with a contrived Southern accent that doesn’t quite work. That bothered me at first, but once the verbiage starts rolling, it doesn’t really matter that much.

The story follows Wolfe and Perkins during the tempestuous writing of Wolfe’s first two novels, Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River. It’s hard to imagine working with a person like Wolfe on a day to day basis. His intensity and manic talking would drive almost anybody crazy, but, on the other hand, you ARE in the presence of a wild genius of a sort that would be like a drug….hard to pull away from, as Max discovers. As such, to adequately characterize a person like Wolfe, the movie has to be more verbal than any movie you have probably ever seen. It’s dense dialog, end to end, so much that, by the time it’s over, you might come out exhausted. As a script, Genius is more like a stage play than a movie, as verbally intense as Hamlet. It has no action of any sort, most of the movie consists of dialog between Wolfe and Perkins.

Genius is mostly set in New York, in the late 20’s and 1930’s, up to the time of Wolfe’s death from tuberculosis of the brain in 1938. Nothing in the movie seems to be filmed on location, but the digital guys did an excellent job of placing the action in a sepia-tinted version of depression era Midtown Manhattan. The outdoor settings are obviously animated, but in a film like this, it doesn’t matter. The characters and dialog are the focus of every minute.

Genius seems to have been a labor of love and awe. Trying to bring a guy like Wolfe to the screen poses problems that defy the usual movie logic of keeping words short and visuals long. I don’t think it’s a movie for general audiences and it might actually fare better as a stage play since theater audiences are used to wordy plays. If you’re a fan of Wolfe (I am) or that period in literature (I am that too) you will enjoy it. If you’re looking for a popcorn movie, you will probably be overwhelmed with words and turn it off. My small audience seemed to have come to see these characters and were quite pleased.

I couldn’t miss this movie. Being from Baltimore and relishing the local connections of Wolfe (who died here) and the Fitzgeralds, who drank, partied, rehabbed, sometimes wrote here, and who left carefully preserved graffiti on the men’s room wall of a speakeasy that was later converted to a bar/bookstore that I frequented in my college years, I initially wanted to see more of Fitzgerald, but was won over by the intensity of the Wolfe story. I can understand the low user ratings for this movie, but I thought that it was pretty good. I can’t imagine how anybody could portray Thomas Wolfe and NOT be excessively talky….it was the nature of the beast. He, and the movie might drive you crazy if you spend too much time, but, if you like this literature, I recommend it.

 

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