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DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull
FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto
PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.
COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”
Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.
Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know about him for sure is that he is an impressively terrible detective. He says he has been fascinated by Einstein all his life, and he claims that he is interested in Einstein’s skull-jelly in particular for a lecture he is giving, but we really have no idea what motivates him. He appears to have done no advance research at all in his quest. He just walks up to people, students and hospital employees and random homeowners alike and tells them, with virtually no preface, “I am looking for Einstein brain.” He stumbles along, acting for all the world like Pavel Chekov asking after the “nuclear wessels.” It’s cringeworthy, but to their credit, people are uniformly polite to this weird stranger, bending over backwards to accommodate him despite the language barrier and also in the face of Sugimoto’s complete lack of social grace. They tell interesting stories (to which he typically responds with a flat “ahh”), reveal compelling insights into the nature of human thoughts (which Sugimoto impatiently ignores), and share whatever physical material they may have on hand, up to and including slides and chunks of the titular seat of cogitation itself. Mission accomplished? No, none of that satiates the professor. What becomes clear to us, even if the film never expresses it outright, is that Sugimoto may actually be something uglier: a rubbernecker, a voyeur who is just trying to collect a prize like it was a Pokémon.
The climactic meeting is appropriately bizarre. Spoiler alert: Sugimoto finds Thomas Harvey in Lawrence, Kansas (not dead, as one contact confidently surmised), and Harvey still has the brain in a couple jars. Harvey turns out to be something of an underachiever; he’s no closer to publishing any findings than he was when Levy located him 15 years earlier, and he’s incredibly slipshod in the way that he stewards mankind’s most illustrious idea factory. “I’d better put some more fluid in there,” he casually observes as he pulls out a container that’s clearly a quart low. When Sugimoto finally makes clear that what he really wants is a piece to have as his very own morbid souvenir, Harvey not only accedes without fanfare or hesitation, but he serves up a slice of the brain on a cutting board like an Easter ham. Afterward, Sugimoto celebrates his good fortune at a Kansas City karaoke bar, while Harvey, the Yale-educated, Princeton-trained pathologist and possessor of the gray matter of the most acclaimed mind in human history, returns to his current job as an apprentice extruder. It’s all unnervingly cavalier. There’s no chemistry between them, no universal force draws them together, but they’re nonetheless a prefect match, these two men with unearned dreams.
In his article, Levy concludes, “(T)here is something very awesome in the postmortem remains of Albert Einstein’s brain. It is something of ourselves at our best, or something of what we humans can be—using our own awesome powers to work out the relation between ourselves and our surroundings.” Einstein’s Brain inspires a different conclusion, revealing that our boundless potential can be sidelined by our own worst qualities: greed, sloth, arrogance. It’s also clear that there’s no story in a three-pound lump of tissue. It’s what the firing neurons inside the brain can imagine that makes the man, and any number of Einstein stories from the rest of “The People’s Almanac”––he was denied the Nobel Prize due to antisemitism, he turned down the presidency of Israel, he was so absentminded that he used a Rockefeller grant check as a bookmark and then lost the book—tell you more about him than anything you might find in the inert flesh he left behind. As for what goes on in the minds of men like Thomas Harvey and Kenji Sugimoto, that remains a mystery.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by budpap. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)