Genius

Thomas Wolfe was repeatedly told by his trusted editor that his manuscripts were too long and rambling, filled with extraneous details and irrelevant tangents. Curiously, Genius is almost the opposite.

This period drama chronicles the true-life partnership between the emotionally unstable novelist and the more level-headed literary editor who shepherded his rise to prominence in New York during the Depression. Yet it sacrifices depth and context in favor of overwrought confrontations and emotional contrivances that make its artistic portrait seem slight.

As the film opens, the fledgling career of Wolfe (Jude Law) is given a lifeline by Max Perkins (Colin Firth), an esteemed editor at Scribner’s with a history of taking chances on troubled projects. Wolfe’s erratic behavior might be off-putting to some, but seems captivating to Max, who only sees the talent in his words.

That devotion to writing deepens the unlikely friendship between the two men as they agonize back and forth over edits to the author’s most famous works, including Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. But their partnership puts a strain on their relationships, Wolfe to his outspoken wife (Nicole Kidman) and Max to his wife (Laura Linney) and family.

The film sufficiently captures its setting, and perhaps more importantly, it hearkens back to an era long before audio books and Kindles, when hard-cover books served as the only conduit between author and reader, and when the editing process consisted of face-to-face meetings over printed pages in smoke-filled offices rather than emails and Google docs.

Still, the screenplay by John Logan (Gladiator) falls short in terms of character development. While it dives into the creative process to a certain extent, the film never really conveys what makes Wolfe’s rhapsodic prose so distinct — how he mixes styles and tones, for example — nor what Max sees in it that his colleagues do not.

To suggest that an editor who oversees works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway somehow needs this boorish lunatic to further his career seems far-fetched. And amid all the macho posturing, the women in the film are left to be passive and vulnerable.

Rookie director Michael Grandage, a stage veteran, can’t reconcile that emotional void in a film that never explicitly identifies which man is the Genius of the title, but doesn’t make much of a case for either one.

Rated PG-13, 104 minutes.