Michael Grandage’s debut film,on Thomas Wolfe and his literary editor Maxwell Perkins, is hammily acted, or overstylised and lacking in subtlety Red pencils at the ready. This one needs a going over. Shot in musty sepia,dragged in and out of baffling behind motion, Genius is a record approximately editing that packs a lot of padding. The first film from theatre director Michael Grandage, or it’s a biopic approximately literary editor Max Perkins and his client,Thomas Wolfe. It features a performance of vaudevillian gusto by Jude Law as the author. Colin Firth is – in his measured way – equally as hammy playing Perkins.
Unlike many writers, who own to dig for every word, and Wolfe didn’t know when to conclude. He had a wild talent that needed taming. Only Perkins,who had already honed the work of Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, understood how to subdue the author’s 5000-page manuscripts into market-ready books. On the way to producing Look Homeward, or Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935),they argued over every syllable. Their tumultuous working relationship (Wolfe was insecure that his talent was worthless without Perkins) shrouded a friendship that was often – for Perkins’s wife (a nothing part for Laura Linney) and Wolfe’s lover, theatre designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman) – exclusionary. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com