‘Flash of Genius’ mugged by critic

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Variety’s Todd McCarthy has been on a one-man campaign to derail Marc Abraham’s upcoming film, ‘Flash of Genius,’ which stars Greg Kinnear as an oddball inventor whose idea for an intermittent windshield wiper is ripped off by the Ford Motor Co. I’ve seen the film and in my opinion, it’s a charming, refreshingly low-key and well-acted little-guy-fights-the-system drama that has a special resonance these days, especially after nearly eight years of Republican rule where Corporate America has enjoyed all sorts of tax breaks but little in the way of government oversight.

But McCarthy seems intent on taking down the movie, which debuted over the weekend at the Telluride Film Festival. His recently published review sniffs: ‘ ‘Flash of Genius’ is anything but.’ He dismisses the movie as ‘very small potatoes ... to the point that it’s a wonder it was thought to be strong bigscreen material; an old-style TV movie would have been more like it. Pic’s pervasive blandness marks this as a theatrical also-ran.’ If that wasn’t enough, McCarthy took another shot at the film in his Telluride wrap-up, upbraiding the festival for even admitting the film, saying that Telluride ‘has no need to show pictures like this just because they’re in the prestige fall rollout parade.’

It’s true that you always take your chances when you put your movie in a film festival, especially if you’re a big studio trying to launch a movie that needs critical support to hit paydirt. In 2006, Warners took Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’ to the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was so eviscerated by critics that it was hardly a surprise to see it take a dive at the box office when the studio released it later that fall. Last year, Sony bought James Gray’s ‘We Own the Night’ on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, where it was so rudely dismissed by critics that it never really recovered, doing only very modest business when the studio released it later in the year.

So Universal Pictures must’ve known the risks when it took ‘Flash of Genius’ to Telluride. A bad review in Variety isn’t a game ender, but it does send out an initial wave of negative buzz that is often hard to overcome. What’s worse -- though I have great regard for McCarthy as a critic, I think he’s been unduly harsh and is just flat-out wrong about the film. Kinnear is at his best playing scrappy underdogs and Abraham, a producer turned filmmaker, has a nice feel for character and period, doing an especially nice job of capturing the country clubby feel of 1960s Detroit, when Ford and GM were full of corporate swagger and heft.

As it turns out, ‘Flash of Genius’ is one of the few movies that was invited to both Telluride and Toronto, putting it in distinguished company. My colleague John Horn was at Telluride and says the people he spoke to who saw the film -- just regular festival-goers -- were impressed by it. In fact, the Telluride screenings were so popular that the festival had to put on additional showings.

My suspicion is that McCarthy’s real problem with the movie -- as he implied in his Telluride wrap-up -- is that film festivals shouldn’t be showing what he believes are everyday studio product. If so, he oughta get off the festival circuit, starting with Toronto, which, as always, is loaded with studio fare, some of it no doubt bland and forgettable. The L.A. Film Festival actually premiered a Michael Bay movie a few summers back, which gives you an idea of the length festivals will go to get attention these days.

But Todd should find some other movie to pick on. ‘Flash of Genius’ is hardly assembly-line fodder. It’s a lot closer to a Ford Mustang than an Edsel.