Starring Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham. Written by Philip Railsback. Directed by Marc Abraham. (PG) 119 min. Opens Oct 3.
Rarely has a movie about a little guy who takes on a corporate Goliath seemed quite so little as Flash of Genius. Inspired by the New Yorker article by John Seabrook that originally brought this story to wider attention, this plodding docudrama charts the travails of Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), a Detroit engineering prof who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. His eureka moment comes one rainy afternoon when he realizes he should essentially teach the wipers how to blink.
Kearns’ worries that the auto industry will deny him credit for the idea prove to be well founded. Thus does he spend much of the next two decades embroiled in a battle with the Ford Motor Company over patent rights, a costly fight that seriously harms his relationships with his wife Phyllis (Lauren Graham) and their unfeasibly large collection of offspring.
Director Marc Abraham struggles hard to portray Kearns as an Everyman hero. But his saga does not yield the stuff of great drama, despite the destructive impact of the suit on Kearns’ family life and his own mental health. A late-inning appearance by Alan Alda as a cynical lawyer undercuts the film’s overweening air of earnestness, but, for the most part this dreary tale of one man’s principled stand against big business plays like Erin Brockovich without the cleavage or Tucker: The Man and His Dream minus all of a car’s cool parts.