Flash of Genius

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

After I watched Flash of Genius, I was interested enough in its subject matter to seek out the article upon which it's based, "The Flash of Genius" by John Seabrook, which ran in the New Yorker in 1993. (The whole thing is here, for those interested.)

The article and the movie each detail the life of Bob Kearns, an engineering professor who in 1962 invented the intermittent windshield wiper, which unlike the wipers of the times could wipe at various intervals, like a blinking eyelid. He patented the invention, but Ford, and later Chrysler, stole it. Kearns sued, and a David vs. Goliath story was born.

The New Yorker article presents Kearns more or less favorably. But it also points out that his quest for justice and recognition had turned obsessive, that he had roped all his children into working full-time for him, and that he planned to keep suing various companies for pretty much the rest of his life (he died in 2005 at seventy-seven years old). It also includes arguments for the other side -- that Ford had men working on similar devices at the same time, that naming Kearns the sole "inventor" of the intermittent wiper robs those men of their own recognition, that the often Byzantine U.S. patent system can easily be exploited by independent inventors.

The movie ignores these shades of gray: Kearns is the good guy, Ford is the evil corporation. It's a feel-good story of one man against the machine, and on those terms it works well, thanks almost entirely to Greg Kinnear's performance as Kearns.

Kinnear is perfect for this type of role. The man oozes quiet sincerity from his bones. He's always been an unpretentious actor, and in Flash of Genius he lends that likable persona to a simple, slightly awkward family man who adamantly believes in justice.

The film opens with Kearns at his lowest point: after suffering a mental breakdown, he's picked up at a bus station by two police officers: "Mr. Kearns, could you come with us? Your family's worried about you." The movie then jumps back to the past three years, which didn't bode well: if the whole movie would be spent leading up to this point, it would be a drag.

Luckily, the story catches up to that bus ride only about halfway through, and we're thus not subjected to two full hours of an ordinary guy getting royally screwed over. Kearns instead rebounds, and the second hour chronicles his serious attempt to sue Ford and actually bring the case to trial -- against a company that has enough time and money to keep delaying the trial, for years. But Kearns won't give up.

He temporarily hires a lawyer named Gregory Lawson (Alan Alda, who only gets two big scenes but is incomparable in both of them). After much work, Lawson's thrilled to report that Ford has offered Kearns a hundred-thousand ...