Movies often lie to us, and sometimes they lie to themselves.
"Flash of Genius" thinks it's an inspirational, based-on-fact, little-man-beats-the-system drama, when in fact it is one of the more depressing pictures I've seen in quite some time. It asks you to smile in the face of enormous sadness.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Running time: 114 minutesRated: PG-13 (language) On the Web
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Greg Kinnear stars as Robert Kearns, the college professor and basement inventor who perfected the intermittent windshield wiper in the 1960s. He brought the product to the Ford Motor Company, where promises of great success and riches were made.
Then Ford cut its ties with Kearns, only to launch an intermittent windshield wiper of its own a short time later. Kearns spent the next 12 years in a legal battle striving to receive proper credit.
You might think a film about windshield wipers would be boring - and you would be right. Kinnear mostly expresses various degrees of peevishness, while first-time director Marc Abraham's dingy visuals make you wish you had a windshield wiper for the movie screen.
Yet the most troubling thing about "Flash of Genius" is its insistent and misplaced sunniness.
Sure, the picture briefly touches on the down side of Kearns' pursuit for justice. His obsession with proving Ford wrong leads to a mental breakdown and a stay in a psychiatric institution. Upon returning home, he continues to alienate his wife (Lauren Graham) and six children to the point where she packs up the brood and leaves him.
The rest of the film traces Kearns' reclusive life of legal petitioning. Stuffed in a dumpy apartment filled with diagrams and documents, Kearns gets occasional visits from his children, during which he promptly puts them to work researching his case. It's a dismal situation, yet "Flash of Genius" sees it as heartening.
When Kearns finally gets his day in court against Ford, the movie really ramps up the rah-rah filmmaking. Kearns chooses to represent himself, allowing for some endearing courtroom fumbling, while one of his sons sits next to him as junior counsel.
It's all cute enough, yet throughout "Flash of Genius" I had a nagging feeling that this time in the life of the Kearns family held more pain than triumph - no matter what the final court decision (which I won't reveal but you can probably guess).
It's not that I didn't root for Kearns. He was clearly ripped off on a colossal scale. And watching him jump through thousands of corporate hoops in order to right that wrong will engender empathy in anyone who has ever argued over their cable bill.
Yet the tragic irony of Kearns' story is that he lost an awful lot by trying to reclaim something that was stolen from him. And that's a truth "Flash of Genius" doesn't want to face.
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