What is it with this film? It’s about the guy who came up with freakin’ intermittent windshield wipers, for heavens sake. He didn’t cure cancer, he didn’t invent the Internet. This is a film about an eccentric inventor who sacrificed his family (a wife and six kids!) his job, his reputation, millions of dollars and even his sanity, all for the sake of getting Ford to admit that they stole his idea.

If he was such a genius, why didn’t he put his family before his ego, take the money and live happily ever after? No, this man of “superior intellect” chooses to spend 12 years fighting corporate America, at the expense of being there for his children as they grow up, all for the sake of intermittent windshield wipers? That’s not a good story, it’s a pathetic one. So they make a movie out of it? The publicity would have you believe it’s about a little guy fighting back against the system. It’s for every inventor who has ever had his patent rights stolen. Tell that to Robert Kearn’s children, who had to spend their formative years without their father.

Even if he can win a court battle in which he represents himself, and even if the jury awards him the millions he’s hoping for, no amount of money can repair his family. And we’re dragged through the drama of his odd decisions and behavior for two long hours, and we realize that there can’t possibly be a satisfying payoff. Greg Kinnear does a fine job of playing the befuddled, if not completely off his rocker “hero,” and Lauren Graham is more than adequate as his wife. Alan Alda makes an appearance as one of many attorneys, and Dermot Mulroney, as Kearn’s friend and business partner, is distracting in a truly hideous 60’s wig. The actors are willing, but the script is weak. The story is based on truth, and was taken from a 1993 New Yorker article by John Seabrook. It’s a good 15-minute read, but hardly worth a major motion picture, or the money you’d pay to see it.

Rated PG-13.  

-- Lisa Johnson Mandell