The genius of Genius is that, although it revolves around the publication of Thomas Wolfe’s novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, it’s not a film about writing but about editing; accordingly, editor Max Perkins (Colin Firth) is devoted as much time and importance as is Wolfe (Jude Law) himself.
Both have significant others, and we know, because they are played by Nicole Kidman and Laura Linney, just by looking at them that both Wolfe’s lover Aline Bernstein and Perkins’s wife Louise have a major presence in each man’s life – these are truly the women that stand behind great men, if I may use a non-empowering figure of speech. Perkins’s greatness lies in his ability to recognize greatness in others; prior to Wolfe, he ‘discovered’ Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, the latter played briefly but solidly by the always effective Guy Pearce).
Aline and Louise are not muses, however, and Genius is only a love story in that it chronicles Perkins and Wolfe’s, for lack of a better term, bromance. Their marriage is perfect because Wolfe believes, like Picasso, that inspiration should find you working (a belief which becomes apparent when he strolls in Perkins’s office with Of Time and the River’s 5,000-page first draft), while Perkins is a staunch proponent that less is more.
The film’s greatest insight is that, whereas writing is a lonely one-man endeavor, rewriting is ideally a two-person job because you need at least one other set of ears to listen, and another mouth to provide that invaluable commodity known as feedback – but it can’t be just anyone either, and it’s Wolfe’s good fortune that he finds in Perkins his, to borrow Stephen King’s term, ‘ideal reader;’ the one who will encourage him, to borrow another Kingian tenet (who in turn borrowed it from someone else), to ‘kill your darlings’ (“even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings”).
Thus, the movie’s best sequence has Perkins and Wolfe whittling a paragraph from 232 words down to just 25. I especially liked how Wolfe uses onomatopoeia to illustrate his character’s falling in love, and Perkins asks him, rhetorically, “The whoosh, the clatter. Is that the point?” – and of course it isn’t, considering that “So quickly did he fall for her that no one in the room even heard the sound;” if no one heard it, who cares what kind of sound it was, right?
Now, I don’t know how faithful to the actual events Genius is (my guess is not much; moreover, one wonders how the literati might have felt about a movie wherein Perkins, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and Papa Hem are all played by British actors), but that’s beside the point; unlike most biopics about writers in particular and artists in general, this film is faithful to the creative process.