The Odd Factual Gaps in Michael Grandage’s “Genius”

Fact-checking a movie that’s based on a true story is a facile way to review it, but “Genius,” the director Michael Grandage’s film about the Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his turbulent relationship with the novelist Thomas Wolfe, sticks its chin out and asks for it with a title card that declares it to be “a true story.” Not “based on a true story” or “adapted from a true story,” but the true gen. What’s more, another card states that the movie is based on A. Scott Berg’s biography “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.” Yet a glance into the book reveals that the movie departs in important ways from the historical record that Berg, in his superb book, establishes. This fact alone wouldn’t necessarily count against “Genius”; what counts against it is the fact that it’s a superficial, genteel bore of an experience—and that the movie’s meagreness arises precisely from the thinning-out and bowdlerization of its source material.