There’s never been a big-screen adaptation of any Thomas Wolfe novel — in marked contrast to his contemporaries F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who have also been portrayed by actors in several movies.
Jude Law gives arguably the worst performance of his career as Wolfe in “Genius,’’ the ham-fisted directing debut of noted British theater figure Michael Grandage, bombastically adapted by John Logan (“Gladiator’’) from a biography by A. Scott Berg.
The film focuses on Wolfe’s relationship with legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins (a bland Colin Firth), who in (a clichéd) New York of the Roaring ’20s trims down a much-rejected manuscript that ran over 1,000 pages into Wolfe’s classic best seller “Look Homeward, Angel.’’
Their friendship effectively ended because of the more drastic cuts that Perkins made to shape “Of Time and the River’’ — a massive work delivered in four crates — over two tumultuous years. Even Perkins’ former protege Hemingway (Dominic West) loudly mocks the bard of Asheville’s logorrhea in this lumbering, dramatically inert film.
Law plays every scene to the balcony as the raving genius, who also broke with his long-suffering lover (Nicole Kidman, also way over-the-top) before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. But a few tortured glances from Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald are worth far more than an hour-and-a-half of Law bellowing Wolfe’s prose.