An intensely private, troubled genius he might have been. But it's hard to reconcile pianist Glenn Gould's image as a virtual hermit with the wealth of footage of him on offer in Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.
Try to imagine a doc on, say, J.D. Salinger that had him on film from childhood to adulthood, with personal glimpses from home movies, videos of day trips and hard at work.
The title notwithstanding, the movie doesn't break much ground as far as insights into the man's character and contributions go -- and after the dozens of treatments of his life, it's hard to imagine it would.
It doesn't even go so far as to indulge in amateur psychiatry, which is hard to resist when you see the crabbed handwriting in the painstaking hypochondriacal records Gould kept of his blood pressure and other vital signs (coff -- obsessive compulsive disorder -- coff).
But Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould scores a perfect 10 in two why-should-I-watch-this areas that are key to any documentary. It has a wealth of valuable footage (mixed with a few deft dramatizations), and it has "news value."
The latter is Gould's "dark secret," his longtime affair with the wife of his friend and fellow musical luminary Lukas Foss, a menage a trois that saw Cornelia Foss and her two children move to Toronto for five years before giving up on the odd stepfather and moving back with Foss. While the emotionally scarring affair was actually publicly revealed a few years ago (decades after Gould's death at age 50), it can be considered officially out of the closet with Genius Within and its intimate interviews with all those involved (Foss' grown son Christopher is particularly touching recalling the family schism).
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Otherwise, what Genius Within offers is a fleshing-out of what we know, akin to adding more pixels to a digital portrait. He is interviewed in all his handsome young-rebel glory, a veritable rock star of the classical world. We see him as an older man-child, serenading an elephant at the zoo or clumsily flirting with a woman by pretending to direct her in a movie. We have the in-depth insights of lifelong friend John P.L. Roberts, who gives the closest the film delivers to a psychiatric assessment. Of course we see him overdressed for summer, a trademark look.
And we see him in his post-performance incarnations, including arty entertainments created for the CBC -- heavily scripted and awkwardly delivered (the film does suggest that Gould's overwhelming need for control was his creative undoing, given that his genius lay in spontaneity).
And of course, it's all sandwiched between two Goldberg Variations -- the famous one that brought the impertinent youngster to the world stage, and the quirkier, more thoughtful one he recorded nearer to his death.
Through it all, Glenn Gould remains elusive, the self-invented parts jostling for time with the occasional peek behind the curtain. Still, they're all pieces of a puzzle, and Genius Within arguably boasts more pieces than any other previous documented look at the man.
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