Genius :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Genius, starring Jude Law and Colin Firth, and now showing on HBO, was hit hard by the critics. Not a movie designed for box office success either, it certainly didn't achieve any,

But I liked this movie, and fellow writers might want to check out the first 10 minutes, because there's something to be learned when it comes to constructing character.

The main character is Max Perkins, a literary agent/editor who discovered Fitzgerald and Hemingway and helped guide their projects to publication. In this story, he discovers a young eccentric writer names Thomas Wolfe.

Before we meet Wolfe, his manuscript gets dropped off with Max, who has been told no one else has any use for it. He reads it on the train home, and continues to read it at home while we meet his family. We get voiceovers of Wolfe's words in the author's voice. And here's where the construction of the film was simply brilliant.

In this sequence where we meet Max's family, we learn his flaw: he does not embrace life. But this is a very tricky scene to pull off, because it has to be done in a way where we still care for the character. So we meet Max's family, and they are the very definition of filled to the brim with life. The wife, all the daughters, they are the most lively bunch you could imagine. He's the luckiest man in the world... but doesn't stop to appreciate it. Doesn't stop to share it. That's his flaw, and through his interaction with the erratic Wolfe, by the end he will learn it.

But as I said, this kind of set up is tricky. How do you show the man not appreciating his vibrant family and at the same time still leave him an endearing character that we care about? The filmmakers do this by going out of the way to show his love for his family. He doesn't share their vitality, but he loves them...and they love him. That's important too. They hurry to hug him when he enters the door...though he remains cool, as expected. They tease him playfully at dinner, though he seems to have little humor in him.

To top it off, as this sequence ends, a sequence that has been mixed with Wolfe's words, this is the final voiceover of those words:

"He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left yet does not say the town is near, but turns his eye on upon the distant souring ranges"

When Wolfe wrote these words, he had something else slightly in mind. But the words resonate with new meaning for our protagonist, who takes the long train to work everyday, searching for the next great author, perhaps living vicariously through them, an meanwhile leaving behind the tremendous gift of his family without appreciating it for the gift that it is.

Setting up a protagonist with a flaw or an internal need can be tricky sometimes. There is the risk of making the character unappealing to the audience. This film handles it deftly.

I found the rest of the film to be quality too. But it's boring. I mean it's hard to appreciate the film sometimes unless one is a writer. A lot of time is spent with the two characters battling over editing his massive work.

Usually in a film like this, the partner character has the opposite problems of the hero. They do attempt that here. Wolfe engages life fully, in his way, which makes him destructively selfish, destroying relationships with those around him. Only problem is that it's hard to call a character that writes 16 hours a day 365 days a year engaging life fully. He lives in his mind, and since most of his works are about his own life growing up, he lives in the past. The reciprocal set up doesn't quite work.

But I still enjoyed the attempt. Even if you don't like slow movies like this, and I usually don't either, as a writer it's worth checking out the first 10 or 15 minutes to learn from the effective set up.