Try imagining the pitch for Flash of Genius: “It’s a true story about the guy who invents the intermittent windshield wiper blade and his subsequent fight for recognition. I’m telling ya, this thing is gonna write itself.” On its face, it’s not exactly the sort of story that sets studio heads’ hearts aflutter. So it’s a good thing that the film merely uses windshield wipers as a framing device to talk about business ethics. Sometimes art and current events collide with a delicious serendipity.

Greg Kinnear plays Robert Kearns, a college professor who, during a torrential rainstorm, comes up with the idea of the intermittent windshield wiper. Enlisting the help of his best friend Gil (Dermot Mulroney), Kearns pitches the idea to Ford. Astonished that an independent inventor came up with a device in his garage that was befuddling all their top engineers, Ford agrees to bring Kearns into the fold. Things are looking up for Kearns, his wife (Lauren Graham) and their six kids.

Then, inexplicably, Ford backs out on their deal. For months Kearns tries to figure out why, but is repeatedly stonewalled. When he happens upon a trade show and sees his technology incorporated into all of Ford’s upcoming models, he realizes his patents have been stolen. Energized with a berserker’s obsessive sense of justice, Kearns embarks on an odyssey for recognition that will consume a quarter of his life, shatter his family into pieces, bury him in litigation, temporarily land him in a mental institution, and pit him, alone and representing himself, against the largest, most powerful automobile maker on the planet.

Director Marc Abraham’s David-versus-Goliath docudrama is adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New Yorker. This is not the story of an invention, but the inventor. The film blasts past the actual construction of the windshield wipers because its interest is actually in what follows. Early on in the film, Kearns lectures his students about the most imperative aspect of their future engineering careers — ethics. The man who designed the artificial heart and the man who designed the Nazi gas chamber were both inventors, he says, but it is morality that decided the path of their genius.

Flash of Genius reminded me of Aaron Sorkin’s (The West Wing) terrific Broadway play The Farnsworth Invention about a rural boy genius who invents television only to have the idea stolen by RCA. The film is, essentially, Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action. There is no denying that the man-against-the-machine narrative carries tremendous weight and inherent drama, regardless of the object that is being contested. So why is Flash of Genius so uninspiring? The premise was dramatic enough to hold my attention, but the execution was not. Flash of Genius is not a compelling movie. It has all the right ingredients, but can’t seem to combine them in a manner that is cinematically palatable. It’s not a bad film, to be certain, but it feels as if pieces are missing, physically and emotionally. First-time director Marc Abraham simply does not inject his film with the same sense of urgency as his leading man displays.

Some viewers may find Kearns’ ethical center a bit skewed. True, he would turn down a king’s ransom for a simple admission by the automotive industry that he was the inventor who designed something so ubiquitous that every person who drives a car has one, and yet, at what cost? What is justice gained at the expense of losing those you love? This is the most interesting question the film raises and it leaves the answer to the viewer.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.