Un éclair de génie

Saw the very first showing of this tonight at the Traverse City Film Festival. It was a good movie and Greg Kinnear was very good. The film felt too restricted and hyper focused on the primary movie subject, Bob Kearns. It could have been made better by infusing a bit of side-story from the conflicting characters points of view. Bob Kearns low point in the movie also seemed to happen abruptly with no run-in to the plot twist, so much so that I felt like I missed something. Lauren Graham offered a fine performance, as did Dermot Mulroney's limited screen time. Overall I liked the movie but felt more could have been done to fill some gaps.

How many inventions that we use on day-to-day life are actually stolen ideas of some unsung individuals!!

Singer sewing machine, phone (yes nor Bell after all but Elisha Gray), radio, monopoly game, Jack Daniels, bulb and in our times, Facebook, google earth and more.... This is a story about one such stolen invention.. it is about a patent infringement by a mega-company Ford Motors. The patent was for a variable speed (blink) wiper or known as intermittent wiper.. it was originally invented by an university professor and an inventor Dr Robert Kearns. It was 1960s.. Americans back then viewed the major corporations as the epitome of Americanism not with cynicism and mistrust. Even though the first-half if the movie is kind of stock-still, but meritorious performance by Greg Kinnear does not leave you cold.. a true story that makes this movie an Olympian in the genre and a good watch ...

Just imagine over 30 years ago inventing something as useful as the intermittent windshield wiper, a device everyone uses when it rains. Now that's immortality for inventor Bob Kearns, professor and engineer.

What is more astonishing is he was almost forgotten after the Ford Motor Company usurped the design and promoted it as its own. The dramatic tension is Kearns' fight for recognition involving years of personal and familial losses. The two moments of inspiration, the "flash of genius," one a personal eye injury and the other driving in the driving rain, are dramatically satisfying if not downright underplayed (appealing to my minimalist sensibilities).

The film is exciting when Kearns is developing the device with those design inspiration moments fleshed out and the partnering with Ford slowly materializing. The film slows down as if in a school zone when at least a third of the Kearns' time is spent struggling with wife Phyllis Kearns (Lauren Graham) over the cost to them in time and trauma to go after Ford. The dutiful wife suffering the ambitious husband has been played in American cinema and theater too much to be fresh, no different here. The scenes with family, especially his wife, evoke my usual response: All right, already, I get the point. Now get on to the good stuff.

Similarly, Kinnear plays Kearns so low key as to be soporific. Although I don't doubt Kearns was an introverted geek, a dramatic rendition would have enlivened the character without compromising his essence.

OK, so, on paper you must confess that any film that dramatises anything involving windscreen-wipers runs the risk of being pretty darn dull. But then at the same time maybe it is one of those films that sounds dull but is actually thrilling by way of drawing the viewer into the subject. When you thing about it, ignoring the part of the car that it involves, this story of the little man put down by a heartless corporation is pretty well timed with the strength of feeling towards our economic ruling class nowadays. So maybe Flash of Genius could ride that wave and deliver an impacting and uplifting story of overcoming at the same time – full of tension and emotion. Well, yes, I guess it "could" but the question is "does it?"

Unfortunately the answer to that is "no" and at best the film could be described as "solid". Contrary to my preconception the film is not dull because of the subject or because it gives lots of detail on engineering but rather because it seems to drag everything out and offer the viewer very little reason to care. It doesn't appear to focus on forward motion because if there is an opportunity to go over old ground or get into a rut then you best believe that it takes it. It is not a grind though, don't get me wrong, it is not a bad film, but just one that seems happy to do very little other than the basics. The courtroom scenes are where it should have come to life but even these fail to thrill or engage – OK they are there and they are "fine" for what they are but how am I the viewer supposed to be excited by what I am watching if the film itself seems all very underwhelmed by it.

I won't say that the cast are the problem but they are certainly part of it. Kinnear tries to deliver the character with real emotion in a way that will draw sympathy from the audience but his drab performance and repetitive delivery is part of the film being slowed down and not allowed to fizz. Graham doesn't help because she is part of this aspect of his character. In fairness she is quite lively and real but she cannot lift the film when the rest of it seems so intent on being average and sluggish. Alda turns up to offer the viewer hope as he enters the film with his custom delivery and energy, having several good scenes before disappearing again. Pileggi is a good solid "baddie" in the corporate sense and perhaps it would have helped to have allowed him more room to play with his character. Sadly none of the cast really gets to do this other than Kinnear, who has to take his scenes down into "despair" in a way that deadens the film and robs it of pace. Perhaps this is an accurate telling of the story but in this case it comes at a price and that price is the film's effectiveness and entertainment value.

This leaves Flash of Genius as a film that is far too worthy for its own good. It plays like a solid TVM and it certainly offered me nothing to justify why it was in the cinema with me when at best it was a DVD release. It has little in the way of drama or tension to it and it is hard to emotionally buy into the film in the way I needed to be able to in order to stick with it. If "solid" is what you are after then this is an OK film but the only remarkable thing about it is just how unremarkable, sluggish and frankly dull the whole thing is.

It was great to see Greg Kinnear in another flawless performance; here as Dr. Bob Kearns, inventor and professor. To me, I think of Mr. Kinnear as sort of the cocker spaniel of American actors. Perfectly companionable for just about everyone. He just feels right in so many roles it's hard to imagine anyone else having done them. This is another instance of his having added immeasurably to what may have otherwise been a more uninteresting character. After all, it's hard to imagine anyone making an engineer or professor seem interesting; but in this outing Kinnear certainly accomplishes that.

Adding her own note of quiet grace and perfect screen presence, Lauren Graham as Phyllis Kearns gives her character both charm and great heart, not to mention that she looks better in a plain white nightgown that just about anyone I've seen... well, except for my wife, of course.

There are other great performances here too, like Mitch Pileggi as the bad guy from any corporation in America, Tim Kelleher as his greasier side-kick and Dermot Mulroney as a slightly smarmy friend of Kearnes'. Likewise the hoard of young actors playing the Kearns children added a perfect familial note to the vehicle.

But, more than any of these fine people, the focal point here was the story as it always is in these social consciousness melodramas. Yes, Virginia. The wheels of American industry is greased with the bones of the cheated and betrayed genius of America. That is so universally true it's a well known sub-plot to all of America's engineers and manufacturers. What is also well known is what happens when they try to find justice, let alone an iota of truth; which is so accurately and skillfully portrayed in this film.

Speaking as an engineer who has worked in American industry for over 40 years, I can say that I have seen this more times than I can count. It goes on every day right here under your noses, America, and no one ever does a thing to change the way America fails to protect her fragile genius. That is deliberately so. That is so because the laws America uses to define how these things are handled are made by lawyers, for lawyers. It would cease to be profitable if the laws were crafted to actually protect it's most precious resource - it's creative people. But it's not; the laws are instead crafted to provide fat and frequent paychecks to every leach that slithers through the "halls of justice".

Just as Kearns did, I had to learn the hard way that justice in America belongs only to those with a fat enough wallet to buy it through the local outlet. If you don't have the six figures to hire a lawyer then you have no rights and no freedom in this country. Like a Wildebeest grazing blissfully in the middle of the herd, you have only not been awakened to that fact yet because no one has yet decided to attack you, or steal from you.

This has been the long way around to tell you that the creators of the film got it exactly right, with one serious flaw... for every Bob Kearns who has eviscerated themselves to win a Pyrrhic victory of the sort we witness here, there have been thousands who have given up for being too shallow in pocket or too short of mental fortitude or too short of the desire for self-flagellation required to press through to an empty, moral victory.

And even here, we see unmistakably that this "victory" costs Kearns what he valued most in his life. He didn't even live to see himself depicted as "heroic" in this fine film.

Still, thank you Bob, wherever you are.