Flash of Genius Review
by Steve Rhodes (steve DOT rhodes AT internetreviews DOT com)October 3rd, 2008
FLASH OF GENIUS
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2008 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
FLASH OF GENIUS, a wonderfully old-fashioned film, tells a heart-warming David and Goliath tale. It's an amazing and touching true story that will have you on the edge of your seat and may even cause you to shed a tear or two. If more movies were like this one, audiences might not feel so cheated on their way out. With a very good first half and an absolutely mesmerizing second half, the movie is thoroughly and consistently entertaining.
Starring a never better Greg Kinnear as Dr. Bob Kearns, an Electrical Engineering professor and a hard working inventor, the film follows this father of six as he defends his patents, which were ruthlessly ignored by all of the big car companies. The story takes some twists and turns you may guess and even more that aren't quite so predictable.
When we first meet Dr. Kearns, he is a despondent, disheveled and downright delusional guy on a bus who thinks he is going to Washington to see the Vice President. In response to a call from his loyal and loving wife, Phyllis (Lauren Graham from "The Gilmore Girls"), state troopers stop the bus in order to retrieve poor Dr. Kearns, who lost his mind because of the strain he is under.
We then cut to three years earlier, when Dr. Kearns and his family are at church. On the way home in the car, he first gets his idea for his famous invention, the "blinking eye." Haven't heard of it, you say? Perhaps you know it better as the "intermittent wiper," a gadget that sounds a whole lot simpler to develop than it was, since the big three car companies could not figure out how to make it work.
Dr. Kearns, who was legally blind in one-eye, due to a wedding night accident, was acutely aware of the function of the eye and the eyelid. He modeled his design for a non-continuous wiper by making it work in sporadic blinks as the eyelid does to clear off the eyeball.
This American inventor and something of a genius put his entire family to work helping him. But his breakthrough in getting it built came from his long-time friendship with Gil Privick (Dermot Mulroney). The company that the wealthy Gil worked for had ties to all of the automobile manufacturers. In no time, Gil arranged a meeting for Dr. Kearns with Ford and soon a deal was cut. Dr. Kearns was very leery of giving his prototype to Ford, even though Ford insisted that the government, for safety reasons, had to be given a working model. As Dr. Kearns was gearing up a factory to build the units Ford wanted, Ford suddenly announced that they were no longer interested. Dr. Kearns was crushed, but it was nothing like what he felt like over a year later, when he saw the new Mustang, which boasted an intermittent wiper, built exactly to Dr. Kearns's design, for which he held five patents.
Most of the movie concerns Dr. Kearns long battle against Ford, who alternately ignored him, buried him in paperwork or offered him various sums of cash to go away. A man obsessed, not with money but with the pride of design, he offered many times to settle with Ford if they would take out a one-page ad in the local paper admitting that they stole his design and had done everything since then to harass him in order to make him go away.
A man willing to risk it all, Dr. Kearns lost his mind and his family in the process of his long legal battle. It is almost impossible not to feel very sorry for him. As he gets sucked into a never ending black hole, you'll be rooting for him the whole time, even if it appears that he may not get what he wants and that, if he does, it might have to be given to him
posthumously.
Gil never gets it. It's "just a windshield wiper," he tells his increasingly obsessed and beginning to be paranoid old friend. But with full clarity of mind and complete conviction, Dr. Kearns explains to Gil that "to me, it's the Mona Lisa."
FLASH OF GENIUS runs 1:59. It is rated PG-13 for "brief strong language" and would be acceptable for all ages.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 3, 2008. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
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