Review of James Marsh’s film “Genius”

James Marsh’s biographical drama Geniuses (Dance First), which tells about the life of the poet and playwright Samuel Beckett, has been released. The picture turned out to be much more traditional than the work of the founder of the theater of the absurd. Tells Julia Shagelman.

The endlessly parodied but immortal genre of biopics gives actors an advantageous opportunity to demonstrate on screen their ability to transform into not just another, but, as a rule, a recognizable person. But it doesn’t leave much wiggle room for directors – who wouldn’t know this if not James Marsh, who directed the neat, if not boring, Stephen Hawking Universe (2014), for which Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for the lead role ”, bypassing three competitors who also played real people, and Michael Keaton, the only nominee that year who did not follow anyone’s biography.

The director of a biopic can be inspired by an encyclopedic article about his hero, showing his life, as they say, “from the cradle to the grave,” he can start from the end, unwinding the events in flashbacks, he can choose the brightest moment of the biography. In Geniuses, Marsh and screenwriter Neil Forsyth choose a combination of these three approaches: the film opens with the awarding of the Nobel Prize to 63-year-old Samuel Beckett (Gabriel Byrne) in 1969. Instead of joy and pride, the laureate is filled with gloomy despair (although it later becomes clear that this is rather his default setting from his most tender years) and begins to remember everyone to whom he feels guilty. This gives the authors the opportunity to divide the picture into chapters named after these people: May (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), Beckett’s mother; Lucia (Graine Goode), daughter of his literary mentor and idol James Joyce (Aidan Gillen); Suzanne (Sandrine Bonner), the writer’s wife; Barbara (Maxine Peake), his translator, editor and lover; Alfred Peron (Robert Aramayo), his friend and comrade in the French Resistance.

Portraying the creative process is another challenge when filming a biopic. The artist enthusiastically covers the canvas with paints, the musician scatters crumpled sheets of music around him, and the scientist feverishly writes down formulas on the blackboard with crumbling chalk. The work of writing is not at all cinematic, just scribble in a notebook or type on a typewriter. But how can one convey the greatness of Beckett’s texts, which are generally difficult to visualize? Marsh avoids this trap by practically not showing the writer at work, but by stylizing the episodes between the biographical chapters in the minimalistic and slightly out-of-phase style of his plays. Having escaped from the Nobel Prize ceremony, Beckett meets his double in an echoing, cave-like room – of course, not the Stockholm City Hall, but his own consciousness – and it is with him that he has conversations about life in anticipation of something as intangible and difficult to define as Godot: either forgiveness, or reconciliation with conscience, or death and oblivion.

Of course, all this looks like a rather simplified variation on the theme of the life of a genius, a sort of “Beckett for the little ones,” in places with elements of a rather primitive armchair psychology. A tense relationship with an overbearing and suppressive mother in childhood leads to the fact that young Beckett (Fionn O’Shea) shuns, if not fears, women and does not want to bind himself to any family obligations. The ugly story of the mentally ill Lucia, whom Joyce’s wife (Bronagh Gallagher) tries to marry Samuel, while Joyce himself sarcastically withdraws, makes him even more withdrawn and pessimistic. Young Suzanne (Leonie Loikin) seems to be able to break through his spiritual armor, but then, as luck would have it, the Second World War begins, finally strengthening Beckett in his low opinion of humanity and everything that it is capable of. In her declining years, Suzanne also turns into an eternally dissatisfied woman with pursed lips, to whom her famous husband brings only disappointment, and she reminds him more and more of his angry mother.

What saves it all from turning into a caravan of stories about the unsightly actions of the talented and famous is Byrne’s thoughtful performance, for whom the duality of his character allows him to simultaneously convey his emotions and look at them from the outside with a touch of irony, all the more valuable in a film that generally lacks humor. O’Shea, in whose performance the young Beckett turned out to be a rather unbearable narcissistic snob, nevertheless evokes sympathy at the thought that life is still knocking down his youthful arrogance, is not lost against his background. Well, this life itself, whatever you say, deserves attention – perhaps many viewers will be surprised by how violently and passionately it was lived by a man in whose works nothing happens.