Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

Dir. Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont
Canada, 2009, 95 mins.

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould is an archival masterpiece. Through video footage, photos, and personal interviews, co-directors Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont attempt to show us a side of the great Canadian pianist that most of didn’t know.

The documentary opens in the place of Gould’s birth, a modest home on a quiet street in Toronto. We are quickly swept away to the quick-paced hullabaloo of New York, where Gould made his professional debut before he turned 20. The film flips back and forth between interviews with Gould’s colleagues, who dissect the prodigy’s impeccable technique on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” and interviews with Gould’s adopted family, including long-time lovers.

What did not work for me, and perhaps took up too much time in the film, was the use of an actor “dressed” as Gould in order to meditate on the pianist’s rather lonesome life. Following what would perhaps be described as the “climax” of the documentary (a story on the partnership between Gould and composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein), the documentary falls into this strange, drawn out loop of “faux Glenn Gould” footage, until we reach his untimely death, which almost seems like a rushed afterthought at the end.

The pace and storyline of the first half of the film was undoubtedly enjoyable and interesting. However, the ending came long overdue. This documentary would probably work best broken up into two to three parts as a television special, which will most likely be its eventual fate on the CBC.