His handsome, Midwestern face and genial demeanor may make him seem at first like a little bit of a lightweight, yet look at his burgeoning body of work: the sad figure of actor Bob Crane in "Auto Focus," the befuddled father trying to keep his oddball family together in "Little Miss Sunshine" and now Kearns.
Kinnear is now 13 years into his accidental foray into acting after years as a talk show personality. "I try not to be too judgmental of my characters, but as (Kearns is) a real-life guy, it's impossible for me to imagine emotionally what was driving him." "I have a couple of kids, and the prospect of dragging them in my wake in any way is kind of a difficult thing to think about," said Kinnear, 45, by telephone. From then on his pursuit of recognition for an invention he calls his Mona Lisa is relentless.Lest you think it's a Tom Hanks-like good-guy-versus-the-system movie, consider that Kearns, in sticking to his principles, essentially destroys his marriage and family. The final moment of truth arrives when he crashes a Ford dealers convention at which the Mustang is unveiled with the intermittent wiper as a prominent selling point. Those dreams are dashed when Ford suddenly and suspiciously loses interest. The story backtracks to his days in his basement tinkering on the invention, which he and his skittish business partner, Gil (Dermot Mulroney), hope will make them rich. Taken to a mental hospital, he is treated for a nervous breakdown and released as soon as his doctor decides his obsession has subsided. Kearns is first seen being escorted by Maryland state police off a Greyhound bus headed for Washington, where he intends to plead his case. Kinnear is a small-scale screen presence comfortable projecting worry, frustration and even nagging obsession moral heroism is beyond him. You never have the feeling that he represents a cause larger than his character’s own personal grievance.
Kinnear, who was so perfectly cast as a screwball rake in “Ghost Town,” undertaking more serious adult roles in which he doesn’t play cute or bratty. “Flash of Genius” would have been more gripping had it pinpointed events and conveyed the harrowing physical, emotional and financial cost of Kearns’s quest.
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The movie doesn’t specify the year or even the decade in which events are taking place except by pop music cues and changing car models. Graham, looking drably attractive, barely change. Kinnear, appearing baggy-eyed and anxious throughout the film, and Ms. The visibly aging children, played by different actors as they grow older, are the movie’s principal indicators of how much time has passed.
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During his final push for a trial by jury, after he is offered generous settlements but no credit for his invention, several of his children work as his assistants. The scenes of Kearns’s domestic life with his wife, Phyllis (Lauren Graham), a schoolteacher, and their six children convey the family’s messy, unglamorous ’60s existence. It also does an exemplary job of articulating the legal issues, with an assist from Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities,” which is used to illustrate an important point. Like the invention at the heart of the story, “Flash of Genius” is a meticulously constructed mechanism, one that wants to convey the same mixture of idealism, obsession and paranoia found in whistle-blower movies like “Silkwood” and “The Insider.” Adapted from a 1993 New Yorker article by John Seabrook and directed by Marc Abraham from a screenplay by Philip Railsback, it has the tone and texture of a well-made but forgettable television movie.Īt least in its climactic courtroom scenes “Flash of Genius” evenhandedly lays out the opposing arguments of Ford and Kearns, who acts as his own defense lawyer. He ultimately sued Ford and then Chrysler for patent infringement. After he presented his invention to the major Detroit automakers, Ford demanded a sample unit, then adopted his system without paying him or giving him credit. Kearns (Greg Kinnear), an electrical engineer and college professor who in the late 1960s invented and patented the intermittent windshield wiper. What gives the movie a frisson of freshness is that the little guy is based on an actual person, Dr. Picture Jimmy Stewart as a passionately outraged everyman speaking truth to power, then take away the passion. “Flash of Genius” is a doggedly workmanlike variation of an old story: the lone crusader doing battle with the big bad establishment.