Movies

The trailers for Flash of Genius, opening this weekend, are in heavy rotation. If you've been to the movies lately or tuned in to any of the rollout of the new fall TV lineups, you've seen one version or another.

JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Associated Press

Greg Kinnear plays Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, in Flash of Genius.

In quick, dramatic cuts, you see scenes from the story of a man whose invention is stolen by a corporate giant and the battle to win the credit he's due. As the David-and-Goliath images play, the grim-voiced narrator intones portentous phrases like "one man's battle" and "the American dream."

It's a familiar Hollywood hook: Little good guy goes up against big bad corporation and against all odds triumphs. On the surface, the story of Flash of Genius' hero, college professor and part-time inventor Robert Kearns, seems ready-made for some silver-screen mythmaking. But make no mistake, the feel-good American myth that the trailers are marketing is not the movie you will see.

G.J. McCARTHY/DMN

Instead, Flash of Genius digs beneath the glossy surface of all those American-dream assembly-line stories and shows something that strikes a lot closer to that experience we commonly call reality. The result is a movie that is as much cautionary as it is inspiring. True to its title (a reference to a phrase in copyright law establishing protection for an idea or invention) this film offers occasional flashes of light and sunshine, but dark clouds and shadows inevitably restore the gathering gloom.

"What you've got to keep in mind," says first-time director Marc Abraham, drawing on his years of experience as a producer, "is that there are two very different, very separate teams involved in any movie. There's the creative team that makes the movie, and there's the marketing team that sells the movie.

"You're right, this is a complex movie. Greg [Kinnear, who plays Mr. Kearns] and I very much wanted to make a movie that went deeper into this story. We wanted to show the price he paid for his refusal to let go, the very real suffering he and his family went through as a result of the choices he made."

That's an important phrase cutting to the heart of this movie: the choices he made. When Flash of Genius begins, in the early 1960s, Mr. Kearns seems to already have the quintessential American dream life. He's happily married, he's got five (!) healthy and happy kids, and he has a job he seems to love as an engineering professor. Then he gets his flash-of-genius idea to invent a windshield wiper that mimics the intermittent blinking of an eye that you can adjust depending on how hard it's raining. At the time this was a big deal because no one had figured out how to do it.

Just as everything seems to be lining up – Ford is going to buy his invention and he's going to manufacture it – Ford pulls out after stealing his idea and cuts him out of the money and credit. Thus begins his decades-long pursuit of "justice." When friends, family and lawyers fail him, he goes doggedly on by himself, amassing documents and legal briefs even as his wife divorces him and his children grow up without him.

While it's easy to cheer him on and say hurrah for the underdog fighting for his day in court, the truth is more complicated. Again and again, he chooses his fight for the recognition he's due over his wife and children, over all the reasons he wanted to succeed in the first place. He can call what he's doing a fight, but watching it unfold, it seems like obsession metastasizing into an addiction. And he can call what he's fighting for "justice," but as the years march on it looks more and more like vanity, a single-minded need to stamp his name on eternity, no matter the cost.

"I think that aspect of his story is absolutely there," Mr. Kinnear says. "I think he got into something so deeply that he lost perspective. I don't say that in a judgmental way. I would never presume to know what was going on in the heart and mind of Robert Kearns. But his family was very important to him, and the choices he made took him away from them. That's part of what this film is about, is the consequences of the choices we make. The things you can't take back or undo once you've chosen them."

Complex and bittersweet may not be as easy as simple and sexy to pitch in a 60-second trailer. But in movies, as with reality, it's often more interesting and satisfying.

ARCHIVES: Search for more stories on this and other topics | Search Tips

SUBSCRIBE: Get The Dallas Morning News delivered to your home