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.
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.