FLASH OF GENIUS PITS A LONE INVENTOR AGAINST THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY
When Flash of Genius begins, Professor Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) is lecturing Electrical Engineering students at Wayne State University, Detroit, about the ethics of their field on the first day of class. (However, all the filming takes place in Canada, not Detroit.) The scene then reverts to a few years earlier when Kearns invents the intermittent windshield wiper in his basement with the help of two of his sons. With the aid of Paul Previck (played by Andrew Gillies), he files a patent for the invention and tries to sell the wiper to Ford, where the vice president for engineering agrees in a verbal contract to purchase the wipers, which are to be manufactured by Kearns. Three months later, however, the deal is off. Ford engineers, exploiting a prototype of the wiper, have designed their own product and reneged. From 1976, Kearns fights to win a copyright infringement case. In the process, he turns down two lucrative settlement offers, is driven at one point to need mental health treatment, is relieved of his teaching position, runs up $10 million in legal fees, and loses his wife Phyllis (played by Lauren Graham) and family of six children. The film is primarily about his obsession, which is fueled in part by letters from other small-time inventors who have similarly been victims of copyright piracy. After one attorney resigns over his refusal to accept a $250,000 out-of-court settlement, he decides to read up on the law and serve as his own attorney. Since his experience is a matter of public record, there will be no spoiler by revealing in this review that he won his case (first filed in 1978) against Ford in 1992 as well as another against Chrysler in 1995, with monetary damages of $30 million, and died in 2005 at the age of 78 of brain cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Directed by Marc Abraham, the story is expanded from an 1993 article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook. Demonstrating as the film does that the people (in the form of a jury) can prevail over corporate power, the Political Film Society has nominated Flash of Genius for an award as best film on democracy for 2008. MH
STILL LIFE DEPICTS LIFE INNUNDATING IN CHINA
The aim of Still Life (Sanxia haoren), directed by Jia Zhang-Ke, is to demonstrate the impact of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China upon those whose homes were inundated along the upper Yangtze. Two phases of the project have been completed, and workers are demolishing the buildings of a town that will be flooded in phase three. Han Sanming (playing a character of the same name), a coal miner, comes from distant Shanxi province to see his daughter and wife, whom he abandoned sixteen years earlier to earn decent wages. His search reveals much about the way in which the people in the town are being mortified by their funereal tasks in what will soon become an underwater ghost town. As is often the case with Chinese films, the expressions on faces and the choice of words communicate a sense of fatalism and nostalgia that all experience as China modernizes relentlessly. The humble emotions of the past are being replaced by the crass materialism of the present. Indeed, the final scene depicts an inevitable victory of the survivalist needs of alienated men who have lost spiritual meaning in their lives. Clearly, the film is an indictment of the cruelty of displacing millions to feed energy needs of millions. Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Still Life for best film exposé of 2008. MH
BODY OF LIES IS DEAD ON ARRIVAL
The point of Body of Lies, directed by Ridley Scott and based on a novel by David Ignatius, is that the CIA is ineffective in the Middle East primarily because of distrust. One source of distrust is between those in the field, personified by Roger Ferris (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), and those at the headquarters in Langley, personified by Ed Hoffman (played by Russell Crowe).The second source is between the CIA and intelligence agencies operating within Middle Eastern countries, notably Hani (played by Mark Strong), head of Jordan’s intelligence agency. To make that point, the film uses endless violence; as a result the message is buried in the rubble that piles up on the screen and muffled by fast-talking actors who never seem to confide to filmviewers what they are really doing with any clarity. They even lie to those to filmviewers by pretending that “jihadists” have no political agenda! Although very impressive, the CIA’s surveillance technology begets effectiveness by giving an illusion of control. The one truth is that the Geneva Conventions are violated with impunity, fueling anti-American sentiment. MH