Earlier this month, PCMag got a sneak peek at the new NatGeo series Genius about Albert Einstein. Given the subject matter, it's a very ambitious project, but ultimately worth checking out.
Genius is National Geographic's first scripted series, and its 10 episodes—which begin airing April 25—are headlined by Academy Award-winning actor Geoffrey Rush, who plays Einstein in his more mature years with eccentric and mad abandon. The physicist's wilder, anti-establishment, and rebellious youth is represented by Johnny Flynn, who does a very credible impression of a younger Geoffrey Rush. That isn't a criticism. He'd have to, or the two performances just wouldn't gel, especially as there's a lot of back and forth between time periods.
Supporting (female) roles are ably rounded out by Emily Watson as his second wife Elsa Einstein, and Samantha Colley as Mileva Maric, who was, despite the challenging times in which she lived, a superb scientist in her own right.
It's always tricky to produce a popular biopic of a globally renowned scientist. It can veer dangerously into salacious material to amp up the drama, diminishing the scientist's achievements. But if you go the other way, it's unlikely you'll retain a large audience. Because let's face it, those interested in Nobel Prize winners of yore are more likely to grab a hefty tome and read about them.
So when executive producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard were tasked with bringing Einstein's life and work to the screen, they were forced into an uneasy compromise. For the purist, their "man behind the mind" approach might be a bit much. But the series is surprisingly informative and highly imaginative in terms of visual expression.
Genius draws largely on Walter Isaacson's book Einstein: His Life and Universe for source material, and is adapted for the screen by writer Noah Pink. Considering Isaacson is best known for writing lengthy biographies of other mortals he considers geniuses (namely Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs), it's probably just as well Pink was brought in to transform the dense prose into lively dialog.
Pink was clearly hired to infuse Genius with a younger, fresh voice, which is also on display in his hilarious short film Ordering Coffee in San Francisco, which deftly skewers the hipster hell that is a Silicon Valley retro-modern caffeine purveyor.
To give Isaacson his due, he certainly provided extensive research for the series to explore. In 2007, during an interview with Amazon for the launch of Einstein: His Life and Universe, Isaacson marveled at the scientist's skills.
"He was actually great in math, because he could visualize equations. He knew they were nature's brushstrokes for painting her wonders," he said. "For example, he could look at Maxwell's equations and marvel at what it would be like to ride alongside a light wave, and he could look at Max Planck's equations about radiation and realize that Planck's constant meant that light was a particle as well as a wave. The most true legend is how rebellious and defiant of authority he was. You see it in his politics, his personal life, and his science."
This is the key to why, in the end, Genius works. The more trippy aspects of Einstein's methods, especially in his visualizations, translate well to the screen. In a statement provided by NatGeo, Ron Howard, who directed the first episode and executive produced the series with Brian Grazer, explained his visual treatment of Einstein's "thought experiments."
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"Both my business partner, Brian Grazer, and I saw real similarities between Genius and looking at Albert Einstein and the work we did with A Beautiful Mind. Both men were visualists — Einstein even more so than John Nash," Howard said. "This gave me, as a director, the opportunity to demonstrate some of these experiments in cinematic ways. I found audiences love to learn, especially when engaging with the character and learning through relationships and drama."
As a final note, if your curiosity about Einstein is piqued by Genius, you might want to do some independent study of your own. The Einstein Papers Project at Caltech (immortalized in The Big Bang Theory) is digitizing 80,000 artifacts from Einstein's archives and PCMag will be visiting the campus when they reach the next milestone in this vast endeavor.