Cinema Hype

Flash of Genius is the kind of sleeper movie that could be riotously successful in the United States. The box-office surge may take awhile—this is a movie about the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, after all—but it’ll come. We eat this kind of thing up: David-and-Goliath stories, the experiences of the ordinary man, hard-fought victories over corporate greed. And cars! We love cars! This movie is potentially a marketer’s dream. It’s too bad, then, that it’s so unsatisfying, so unwilling to commit, and ultimately so depressing.

In Flash of Genius, Greg Kinnear plays Dr. Robert Kearns, the Detroit engineering professor who invented the intermittent windshield wiper in 1963, only to have his patented invention stolen and used by the Ford Motor Company. It comes across as a shootout between Kearns, acting basically alone, and the immense power and weight of the Ford corporation; in actuality, it’s about obsession and its effects on a guy who’s way out of his league. Here’s where things start to go off the rails, so to speak: Kearns isn’t a warm guy. He isn’t wrong, per se, but he’s not someone we root for—he doesn’t make decisions that are likely to sit well with the audience, and the movie doesn’t attempt to sugar-coat the way he is. So although the script is strong and the character is well-rounded, the immediate lack of sympathy turns to boredom disturbingly quickly.

Flash of Genius is bizarre because it portrays Kearns’s choices without really taking a position on whether he’s right to act the way he does—he’s neither a full-fledged hero nor a really epic loser, and the middle ground isn’t satisfying. Not only does the movie fail to answer the obvious questions (Is it worth it? and Is it better to be happy or be right? spring to mind), it doesn’t even ask them. And that leaves the audience hanging without the emotional cues they need.

Kinnear is an excellent choice for Kearns; he excels at playing guys who aren’t really all that likeable, either moving them towards our good graces or just reveling getting to be a bit of a jerk. Here he flirts with the former, but mostly goes for the latter–he seems to get Kearns’s single-mindedness, and again, he manages not to judge the character. He’s especially good at failing to connect with the other characters onscreen, even if he’s connecting with the actors, which is a fine balance. It’s nothing personal; it’s just the way Kearns is, and Kinnear sells that perfectly. Lauren Graham plays Kearns’s long-suffering wife, Phyllis; she turns in a performance that’s nuanced, in the sense that Graham has clearly thought long and hard about Phyllis and her situation, but somehow a bit too modern to blend in properly. Graham is a thinker and a talker and a surprisingly physical actress; she always seems to be moving faster than the rest of the film. Alan Alda and Dermot Mulroney (with his fabulous speaking voice and a truly killer pair of sideburns) also appear; Alda is particularly appealing onscreen.

Flash of Genius may succeed on its quirkiness alone, but it’s unlikely to appeal to the hearts of Americans. It doesn’t have a heart to share; it doesn’t have a message for us, or at least not one we should tape to our bathroom mirrors. In the end, it just leaves us wondering: Was it worth it?

Flash of Genius, Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Alan Alda, Dermot Mulroney, Robert Kearns, Dr. Robert Kearns, windshield wiper, intermittent windshield wiper