Intermittent quality: Fact-based drama 'Flash' fails to notice its real story
"Flash of Genius" completely misses the dramatic essence of its own story.
The filmmakers - producer-turned-director Marc Abraham and screenwriter Philip Railsback - think this fact-based movie is just another bland and blah David-vs.-Goliath tale where a single Everyman takes on a major corporation and wins.
So, what do they give us? Another bland and blah movie about you-know-what.
But wait!
"Flash of Genius" is nothing less than a story of overwhelming destructive obsession. Weirdly enough, the destructive obsession stems not from some dark compulsion (as obsessions tend to go), but from an overenthusiastic devotion to an idealized sense of justice.
When the powerful Ford Motor Co. blatantly steals the intermittent windshield wiper technology from university engineering professor Robert Kearns, he sets out on a personal mission to rebalance the scales of justice by suing the corporation.
Even though his attorneys tell him he has no chance of winning, Kearns presses on.
Even though his legal Odyssey costs him his job, Kearns presses on.
Even though his stubborn refusal to quit costs him his marriage and alienates his five children, Kearns presses on.
Even after Ford executives offer him $30 million to stop, Kearns presses on.
Why? Because Kearns doesn't want money. He wants Ford to publicly admit it stole his invention. That's all that really matters to him. And Ford won't do it.
Here is a great, awful and awesome story of a nutty professor who discarded all the really important parts of his life to satisfy some outrageous, personal standard of justice.
Yes, he won. But he lost far more, and "Flash of Genius" is too entrenched in its petty, shallow root-for-the-underdog formula to even notice that this is tragedy, not a triumphant, feel-good movie.
Greg Kinnear, currently on the screen as a tuxedoed spook in the comic "Ghost Town," plays Kearns with complex vulnerability, one of the film's saving graces.
He's married to Phyllis ("Gilmore Girls" star Lauren Graham), a typical supportive wife during the 1960s back when Kearns first wonders why windshield wipers can't be more like the blink of a human eye.
Dermot Mulroney plays Gil, a businessman who partners with Kearns to manufacture the intermittent wipers after Ford execs contract to buy a zillion of them. At the last moment, Ford pulls out of the contract, leaving Kearns financially devastated.
That pales next to the devastation Kearns experiences months later when he sees a Ford car on the road equipped with his variable-speed wipers. Now it's personal.
Alan Alda brightens "Flash of Genius" with a flash of star power as Gregory Lawson, a feisty attorney willing to take Kearns' case through its legal hoops. Gradually, he falls away, just as our interest in the main character does.
Despite Kinnear's best attempts to keep Kearns empathetic, the dramatically inert "Flash of Genius" undermines his performance with a lackadaisical pace, flat visuals and schmaltzy plot twists usually found in a direct-to-cable movie.
Maybe all of Kearns' children really did grow up and return to old Dad's side during the final stages of his underwhelming courtroom drama. It still feels artificial and phony, but not near as much as Mrs. Kearns, now divorced, showing up to congratulate (and exonerate) her victorious husband, who gets to go home only with the money he never really wanted in the first place.
Still, we care about Kinnear's testy underdog. Just intermittently.
"Flash of Genius"
Rating: 2 stars
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Alan Alda, Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney
Directed by: Marc Abraham
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for language. 120 minutes.