How exciting can a movie about writing be??

Not very exciting, at all. I'd had somewhat high hopes for this film. The actors did their best with the material they had; however, overall, the movie was a disappointment.

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Writing, unless you have collaborators, is a very solitary experience. I saw the trailer of this film today, and while there are the usual emotional fireworks, I thought to myself:how exciting can this be?

Genius is about the collaboration between the author Thomas Wolfe (played by an overacting Jude Law) and the editor Max Perkins (shrewdly and laconically played by Colin Ferth), and the philosophical discussions and aesthetic debates between the two men sometimes make for excellent scenes and sequences, including one in a black nightclub where Wolfe uses music and jazz as the analogy for his point of view. Indeed, the subtext, in my opinion, is who the real "genius" actually happens to be, and the film does not provide a clear answer (although one could make a reasonable guess).

Genius' best scenes, such as the one in the nightclub, are quite enrapturing and fascinating. Some of them involve artistic debates about writing, and others involve relationships and alliances that change or unwind due to the writing collaboration. Unfortunately, these scenes are mixed with bridging material (more or less) that proves perfunctory and a directorial and acting style that is often overly mannered and self-conscious, to the point of excess and dubious effectiveness.

Thus the film amounts to a mixed bag (merely "decent" in my opinion), but I would recommend seeing it if you still can. The better scenes are really worthwhile, and Colin Ferth and a rather ambiguous Nicole Kidman deliver engaging performances. With more consistent and less grandiose direction that encouraged less showiness in places and that explored matters persistently, instead of featuring perfunctory material between high-caliber scenes, Genius could have been "good" or "very good."

To your original concern, I wonder if the director (Michael Grandage) encouraged a showier, fluttery style in part because he feared that there would not be enough excitement inherent in the subject matter. But because of the differing perspectives (with both of the leading characters making compelling and convincing arguments at different points), that subject matter is quite fascinating after all. The director, perhaps, just needed to trust what he had a little bit more. Indeed, the fact that Grandage is a career actor (born in 1962) who made his directorial debut with this film is probably significant—he delivers fine direction in certain scenes and sequences, but with more experience, he might not have strained so much to impose meaning on the overall movie, and he might have managed to take his strong scenes and connect them better so that Genius feels more organic.

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I'm a retired (but still writing) author. Writing, unless you have collaborators, is a very solitary experience.

Yes, writing without partners is a solitary experience but life isn't. I think the reason this film failed was because the screenwriter lacks a love of writers. A story with so much potential has been presented as bland and flat and as devoid of emotion as cardboard.

I saw the trailer of this film today, and while there are the usual emotional fireworks, I thought to myself:how exciting can this be?

The "emotional fireworks" never made it into the actual film. Just a terrible script.

Works about writing and about writers can be life-changing, given the right writer:

Stranger Than Fiction
Adaptation
Wonder Boys
Carrington
Out of Africa
Kill Your Darlings
The Libertine
Anonymous
Henry and June
Becoming Colette
Finding Forrester
Midnight in Paris
Capote
Barton Fink
Tom & Viv
Ghost Writer
Sylvia
Howl
Byron
Finding Neverland
Shakespeare in Love
Rum Diaries
Bright Star
The Way We Were
Trumbo
The Whole Wide World
Mr. Holmes
Misery
A Murder of Crows
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Impromptu
Freedom Writers
Rowing with the Wind
The Shining
The Children of the Century
The Words
All the President's Men
Steal this Movie
Miss Potter
A Mighty Heart
The Great Gatsby
Sophie's Choice
Secret Window
Sex and the City

- just to name a few - and my all-time favorite:

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.





Susan, "but I was thinking..." Leo, "STOP! Thinking is for losers!" - Scandal's satirical message.

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I don't think the subject of writing can really take the blame (or credit) for a film because there's much more at play here -- relationships, desperation and disease. But this film about writers could have been better written because it feels rather soap operatic, and the accents were phony. 7/10 stars from me.

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Very- with the right script. But first you choose a WORTHY author as target, like Dylan Thomas or Hemmingway.

Sadly this film goes the route of those long pretentious articles in the American magazines the Yank chattering classes so love. A lot of words pretentiously saying a lot of nothing about a non-entity - but Yank journalism is predicated on this form of story-telling.

So this film is nothing but second-hand cliches tediously applied to a man no-one needs to remember- some spoilt privileged American whining about his life. Worse, of course, is pretending that an editor has a life story interesting enough to put on the big screen. Yes he worked with some real big names. Yes he did some good technical editing. But how is that screen worthy- this movie sadly proves it is not.

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