Flash of Genius is based on a real story and stars Greg Kinnear as Robert Kearns, the inventor of intermittent windshield wipers, as he fights various American car companies and defends his patent. It hopes to be a twenty-first century Frank Capra movie about a little guy fighting Goliath with Kinnear as Jimmy Stewart, but it ends up being a bland, unforgettable family and court drama leached of anything that makes it interesting. It is apparently adapted from a New Yorker article written by John Seabrook with the same title plus the filmmakers won the Kearns family over and had access to them and their records to insure that the story was close to the truth. Sure. OK.
I have lived for over four decades so I have learned something about human behavior from experience and observation. Flash of Genius, which is completely on Kearns’ side, never suggests that the car companies conspired to destroy his life, just steal his ideas, yet the film shows his life completely imploding on every level. Even the effect of the first scene had me asking, “Wait, people do not get in trouble for simply doing that. What is the real story?” So I ran to Google, and while I could not get as much information as I wanted, I got a little, which suggested that the real life story’s protagonist was way more interesting than the family man and reserved, obsessive inventor depicted in this film. Filmmakers do not leave out sizzle unless they have to pander, and I would not be surprised if the Kearns family agreed on one thing—no drama!
If I was making a film about Kearns, I would have definitely found a way to show that as a teenager, he worked for the antecedent of the CIA, or that during the trial, he allegedly carried on an affair with a paralegal for the opposing counsel to get information to benefit his trial. Call me prurient, but I would have included all those details in the movie. Imagine what else did not end up on Al Gore’s Internet! Instead Flash of Genius shows us a man whom people disproportionately react to with hostility while he politely, in measured low tones, simply states his case. I guess that we still live in a world in which a person tells you a story, and you completely believe his side because you never watched Rashomon.
Dear Flash of Genius, I live in a world in which it is simultaneously possible for corporations to wrong an individual, and for that individual to be a massively horrible person. I can still root for a horrible person. I could have handled a far from perfect Kearns. I am hoping that the filmmakers were capable of making a better movie, but compromised their artistic standards to get the rights to the story. You definitely want to tip toe around a litigious bunch so I can’t blame them, but I think that there is a more engrossing film in a parallel universe in which there is a scoundrel off-the hypocritical, puritanical Catholic patriarch versus the square, but more loose car execs.
I loved In the Bedroom, but my friends and I would joke how people said that Sissy Spacek gave a groundbreaking performance for breaking a plate. A plate! Flash of Genius is so much more subdued. I am not ridiculing or minimizing skin conditions—hell, I have one, but his wife suffering from psoriasis is this dramatic sign that she has too much stress in her life and needs to tone things down. Welp! Then I need to retire. Don’t let me list the physical ailments that I have to deal with everyday then my doctor goes, “Sucks, right,” shrugs then skips away. The only reason that I do not think that the medical professionals do not just point and laugh after I list my symptoms regardless of their gravity is that they are in the same boat. Or systematic racism. Whatever. Any way, it is the kind of movie where two people politely address each other briefly, and I am supposed to believe that was a seismic disagreement. If it was a Jane Austen film, maybe it would work, but this film is set in the mid twentieth century, and the film does not do enough work to establish what normal life is like in this period in Detroit for a Catholic community to help me understand when things have changed and gotten worse. Hell, I did not realize that Dermot Mulroney was playing a childhood friend until the middle of the movie. Yikes! The concept of authentic human emotion and dynamics is completely absent in this film.
I keep revisiting Joel Edgerton’s performance in Gringo, and how he always needs to be on top. I know that if you love your dad, you see him as Kinnear, but you need Edgerton to play him straight and a little awful. Or maybe I am going too far in the dissolute corner, but Flash of Genius made the character so earnest that it did not make sense in the story. This character’s problem was that he did not feel important enough. Seriously? Join the club. Instead of worrying about him not being sympathetic if they showed his foibles, they should have worried about losing the audience for being a whiny, ungrateful man.
Flash of Genius also commits several cardinal cinematic sins. It starts with the how we got here narrative trope by beginning with a scene that actually occurs fifty-two minutes into the film. The movie constantly keeps the audience apprised of how much time has passed, which annoys me. Just say the date! Now that you have made me aware of time, I am actually trying to keep track, but three years earlier then eighteen months after that is when if I never know the date? I should not need a calculator. Either don’t tell me the time, show me in the way that you construct the scene, or be precise.
If I had to compliment Flash of Genius, it is the restaurant scene with Alan Alda, which as a lawyer, I can attest to it being the realest legal moment in the movie. Justice is money in this country. The real life Kearns was allegedly pissed after getting vindicated and appealed the decision because he thought that he did not get enough money in the jury award. I am not saying that justice should be equated with money, but more people need to realize that time is more valuable. Also honorable mention goes to Mitch Pileggi, whom I adore from The X-Files and the fifth season of Supergirl, who maybe gets a total of five minutes of screen time, but acts as if he is the star of the film. He worked it. He throws his cigarette down in disgust when he sees Kinnear as if Kearns just killed his dog. He is magnificent. I love Lauren Graham, and I do not know how she managed to play it straight as the supportive wife without turning to the camera and going, “Really?” I spotted the amazing Tatiana Maslany as one of the six Kearns kids. This movie was just hiding its light under a bushel.
My mom loved Flash of Genius. It needed to be shorter and aired on television, not have a theatrical run if it was going to be so stubbornly white-washed. I completely checked out after awhile. Skip it!