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Berlin 66 Reviews By Alex Deleon GENIUS, Competition, World Premiere. A Throwstone Product. image1.jpeg Max Perkins and Tom Wolfe checking his MMS intently in "GENIUS"

"Genius" Stars Jude Law as genius novelist Thomas Wolfe and an austere Colin Firth who never took hat off until the final scene. Sepia tone photography and meticulous period reconstruction with streets full of proper vintage cars starts out promisingly. New York, 1929. Scribners publishing Co. Thomas Wolfe played by Jude Law as a frenetic young writer from the sticks of north Carolina arrives in The Big City carrying the bound reams of his first novel and brashly forces his way into the publishers office. The editor is quick to realize that he has a raw genius on his hands. This soon turns into a tale of an adoptive father and son relationship between editor Max Perkins (Firth) and the obstreperous genius Thomas Wolfe (Law) -- Colin lives in big manse out on the Island. Wolfe comes to visit. Daughters find him charming and entertaining at dinner. Gracious wife was Laura Linney. Everyone else finds Wolfe a crashing self-centered bore.

At work Perkins does not just correct spelling and red-line bits of writing here and there, but does massive restructuring on Wolfe's mounds of hand written manuscripts -- removing hundreds of irrelevant pages to produce finely honed best sellers. He recognizes Wolfe's genius immediately, but also his excessive verbosity and the need to compact the brilliant prose to make it publishable. The first novel, "Look Homeward Angel" (so renamed by Perkins) is a big hit and runaway best seller. Wolfe is an overnight literary sensation and celebrity. Perkins' wife patiently suffers his constant absence from home to work on the editing of the novels. Wolfe's behavior is outrageous (over the top performance by Jude Law with passable southern accent. ) and generally offensive to everybody within his reach. One wonders if the real Thomas Wolfe was such a rake and so ready to run roughshod over peoples feelings. Colin Firth plays Perkins as a close to the chest taciturn dignified father figure in contrast to Law's raving wild man image. In a way this is a tale of cooperative genius, because without the backup brilliance of Perkins' editing insight Wolfe might never have gotten published. Both were workaholics totally dedicated to their respective crafts -- geniuses in their own way.

Altogether this is a film that will probably satisfy fans of the magnificent writing of Thomas Wolfe (such as Yours Truly) -- but it gets far too wordy in the sections where long excerpts of Wolfe's scintillating prose are Quoted verbatim on screen to the point where the viewer is tempted to scream: "Alright already. I'll read the book later!" Interesting sub plot involves Wolfe meeting his Main rival for the title of top literary genius of the century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, played by Aussie actor Guy Pearce. Nicole Kidman is unrecognizable under an austere black wig as family friend Aline Bernstein and contributes little other than occasional abrasive nagging. Towards the end after a misunderstanding an ingrate Wolfe sells himself to a rival publisher to the dismay of all, especially Perkins who feels egregiously double-crossed. Very heavy atmosphere until Wolfe suddenly dies of Cerebral Tuberculosis at the height of his career, not yet 38. The sense of his impending doom is in the air as the film progresses to a crushing end. Odd that British theater director Michael Grandage chose to cast all English and Aussie actors in the principle roles of such a totally American tale. Sort of like asking Leonardo Dicaprio to play Charles Dickens with an all-American backup cast. I myself happen to be a big fan of the writing of Thomas Wolfe so I was captivated all the way, but the morning press gathering in the Big Hall accorded the picture no more than a slight round of polite applause. I cannot imagine that the general public will be much more enthusiastic.

Alex, Berlin

SPOILER ALERT!

I recently saw "Genius," a cliché-driven borefest that was not a good movie, let alone "a true story." I know the history well; the screenplay seemed to get very little right (other than the fact that Wolfe and Perkins met in 1929). Where a little subtlety would have worked wonders, they went for the cliché every single time.

1) O Lost was not rejected by every publisher in New York. It certainly wasn't the end of the road by the time it landed on Perkins' desk. When they received the 1100 double-spaced pages (not single-spaced, as the movie states), more than one editor at Scribners read portions of the typescript and loved it.

2) Wolfe's lover, Aline Bernstein, was out of his life by the time Look Homeward, Angel was published. She never left her family. She was almost 17 years older than Wolfe. In the movie Jude Law and Nicole Kidman look like they're the same age. 3) Wolfe was 6'6" tall as an adult and it completely shaped his identity. He could never, ever fit in anywhere and was stopped frequently by people making jokes at his expense. He wrote the story, "God's Lonely Man" about living as an extremely tall man. And I don't care how much Jude Law overacts, he can't make up that difference. (He's also six years older than Wolfe was at the time he died.) 4) While Aline did attempt to take some pills in the Scribner's offices (in front of Wolfe and Perkins), they immediately responded, calling the night watchman who called a doctor in the building who ascertained that Aline hadn't swallowed any pills. She certainly wasn't left standing by the elevator as she is in the movie. (Berg, 276) 5) Aline did have words with Perkins over Of Time and River because she didn't want to appear as the character Esther Jack (Berg, 242); they did not remain enemies. Perkins' daughter Peggy actually apprenticed with her after college. 6) Wolfe met Fitzgerald once (in Paris), and exchanged some very interesting letters with him, but they never met in Hollywood (although Wolfe did visit there once). They never had dinner at the Perkins' house and he never met Zelda. 7) During the editing Of Time and the River, Perkins lived in a townhouse on E. 49th Street, a short walk to Scribners. He and Wolfe worked on the manuscript in the Scribner's offices . They never drank and edited in a bar. And Perkins NEVER would have drunk from a pint bottle on a fire escape as he does in the movie. 8) Wolfe did not roll in a wheelbarrow of handwritten manuscript when he submitted Of Time and the River. He always had a typist (even as he was writing on the fridge!) She would pick up his pages and type them as he worked. It was submitted in stages. 9) Both Wolfe and Perkins had very little interest in music, so of course he never took Perkins to a nightclub in Harlem and propositioned women in front of him. 10) The reasons why Wolfe left Scribners are much more complicated than presented in the movie. Yes, people were writing about the "Scribner's assembly line" and Wolfe left himself open to that charge, but there were also three lawsuits that complicated things further. And Perkins knew that Wolfe was writing about Scribners people and his loyalty was to Scribners. It was excruciating for both men. 11) Wolfe did not write his final letter to Perkins after brain surgery (he never regained consciousness). He wrote that letter when he was in the hospital in Seattle with pneumonia. (That's got to be the hokiest scene that I've witnessed in a long time---and it didn't happen that way.) 12) The final scene in the movie didn't happen that way either.

A much more touching, actual event occurred when Perkins went to New Jersey in February 1938 (after Wolfe left Scribners) and testified on Wolfe's behalf in a trial where Wolfe was suing a dealer to get back his original manuscripts.Wolfe and another witness who was a friend of both men, Belinda Jelliffe, were so touched by the fact that Perkins wore a hearing aid (for the first and last time) because he wanted to make sure he heard the lawyers' questions. He and Wolfe spent time together after Wolfe won the trial, the last time they were together.

I could go on and on. There are so many factual errors in this movie, terrible miscasting and, to cap it all off, in practically every scene Wolfe acts like a "monster" (Scott Berg's term). While he was an extremely complicated man, he wasn't a monster If you asked Max Perkins and Aline Bernstein whether they would have preferred not having Wolfe in their lives, the answer would be a resounding no.

Ignore this movie and go to the source: read Look Homeward, Angel and/or The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe.

I watched this at home on DVD from my public library. It also has a couple of interesting extras on how this movie was made. Set mostly in 1929 and 1930s New York, it was shot in England, Manchester and Liverpool most prominently.

What is it about? What does the "Genius" reference mean? According to the filmmakers, and it becomes clear when viewing, it is really about both the genius of creative novel writing and the genius of editing a book to bring it to the masses.

The editing genius was Max Perkins, played wonderfully by Colin Firth. He had served as editor for such greats as Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. He was a kind and organized man, husband, father of five daughters, but also a bit of a workaholic.

The writing genius was Thomas Wolfe, Southerner from North Carolina, played well by Jude Law. Graduating from high school early and from college at 19 with a BA, he attended graduate school at Harvard, receiving a Master's at 21. He arguably was a genius, and certainly Max Perkins considered his writing genius. But Wolfe was very undisciplined and often rude, at one point he asks Perkins, "Do you expect me to grow up like you?" To which Perkins replies, "No I just expect you to grow up."

Perkins and Wolfe could not have been more different, but Perkins became a sort of father figure for Wolfe and his biggest task was to help him cut down his drafts to size suitable for publishing. Wolfe loved his prose, it was always painful for him to cut anything out.

The movie also includes Nicole Kidman in a good role as Aline Bernstein, a married woman 18 years older who became Wolfe's lover and patron. Plus Laura Linney in a good role as Louise, the wife of Max Perkins. In small but important roles we see Guy Pearce as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dominic West as Ernest Hemingway.

A really good biographical movie, it is nominally about Perkins but more about his relationship with Wolfe, who died young from tuberculosis of the brain.

You get starved for movies where adults have adult conversations and do adult things, so you look forward to something like Genius and excuse its faults. This was a pleasant, literate two hours entertainment, suitable for streaming on a quiet Sunday evening when PBS is fund raising.

The movie is Homeric, in the sense that it presents a world where Men do Important Work, and the emotional demands of women are distracting at best and dangerous at worst. Wolfe's patron and lover Aileen Bernstein, a successful theater designer in her own right, is played by Nicole Kidman (in an unconvincing hair design) as an emotionally needy, suicidal/homicidal harpy who can't see why the great writer has better things to do than show up on her arm at her work-related social events. Perkins's wife, the Laura Linney role played by Laura Linney, quietly wishes that he would spend more time with her and their five daughters and less with Wolfe, Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, but she's always there when he needs her emotional support. (The five daughters are just props -- in a story covering nine years, they don't age at all.) At the crisis of editing Of Time and the River, Wolfe and Perkins have parallel arguments with their women, using identical phrasing, about the importance of what they are doing and the unimportance of what the women want from them.

Jude Law gets to chew the scenery with a Foghorn Leghorn Southern accent; Colin Firth does a fine job with a minimalist performance, but the character's mannerism of never taking of his fedora indoors, even at the family dinner table, becomes distracting; it eventually reminded me of B.D.'s helmet in Doonesbury.

The best passage in the movie is when we watch Perkins actually edit Wolfe's florid prose by getting Wolfe to focus on the point of the scene. That's the only time we actually see what gave Perkins his reputation as a great editor; I would like to have seen more.

It's difficult to make a movie about a writer. After all, the only thing they do is sit there and write. Look at the disaster that was "Hemingway and Gelhorn," with Big Ernie played by Groucho Marx. Or "Julia," with Jane Fonda throwing a typewriter through the window. There's the soap opera about F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Beloved Infidel." I mention "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" only in passing.

This effort to capture Thomas Wolfe the way he captured metaphors is more successful than the others. And his writing isn't just alluded to; it's integrated meaningfully into the plot. I haven't read any of his novels. They do go on. Ars longa, vita brevis. But I did skim some shorter work of his many years ago and, without at all trying to, I had one of his more striking images burned into some long-term memory cell -- something about a setting sun over Brooklyn hanging in the sky "like a hot copper penny." It ain't bad.

Neither are the performances, all of which clear the bar. Nicole Kidman is Tom Wolfe's married lover who has sustained him over the rough patches. He discards her when he no longer needs her, but who can blame him? A theater person, she is hysterical half the time and rude the other half. She gobbles pills in a fake suicide attempt and pulls a pistol on docile Max Perkins. It all began to remind me of my marriage. Guy Pearce has a small role as a distraught F. Scott Fitzgerald and is perhaps a bit robust for the part. Laura Linney is fine but doesn't have much to do as Perkins' wife.

The film belongs to Colin Firth as Max Perkins, the editor as Scribner's publishing house, and to Jude Law as the passionate, loud, Byronic Thomas Wolfe, shouting ecstatically, waving his arms about, recklessly drunk. His prose is, as they say, sheer poetry. But he has a genuine problem with his writing. Everything he writes goes on too long. If a minor character makes an appearance, say, a railway porter, Wolfe gives us his whole life story. Perkins' job is to winnow the prose until it's golden. When discussing the fourth chapter of one of the novels with Wolfe, Perkins explains why the text is prolix and makes observations and criticisms that would benefit a high school lit class. It's clear without being challenging. Nicely done by screenwriter John Logan.

Throughout the film, Perkins wears a fedora. He doesn't take it off when he's at the office or at home having dinner. There's no indication that he removes it when he goes to bed. He's a prim, stuffy, urban bourgeois who is introduced to rhapsodic displays in what would have been called Negro night clubs. I thought Perkins always wore that conspicuous hat because he was hiding a bald spot, but no. He wears it so that in the last scene, after Wolfe has passed away, he can reveal the depth of his affection for his lost friend by removing it for the first time. In this final scene there is a slow pan across the book shelf in Perkins' office. The modern classics are all there, cheek by jowl -- Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and the rest -- and Wolfe's novels are among them. All except one, "You Can't Go Home Again." It was Wolfe's ultimate work but was patched together by a different editor.

This is a rare, successful movie about a writer and about his editor. What could have been either extremely dull or extremely phony, isn't either. It's not a masterpiece but it's pretty good.

This film was so bad. Cliché ridden as all hell (excuse the cliché). As soon as Jude Law arrived on screen one takes an instant and intense dislike to him. The character is just loud, verbose and annoying. At one point soon after his first appearance, someone refers to him as the son Max never had -- at which point, it's HUH?! CLEARLY I MISSED WHERE THESE TWO WERE SO CLOSE. Later, Jude Law's character (I won't dignify him by calling him Thomas Wolfe) teaches Max (a silent Firth) the "right" drinks to drink (bourbon instead of vodka) and the "right" music to listen to (jazz, of course) and picks up whores, making him, ergo, a fascinating guy who REALLY knows how to live. As for the wife, well she pops pills and pulls guns and goes all psycho for no discernible reason at all. The life of a writer is depicted oh, so writerly, all tortured genius etc. where writers obsess constantly about writing (and nothing else). Surprising, as this was (I think) written by a writer. Pretentious nonsense and boring as all hell ('schuss the cliché).