Nobel Son

“Keep your eyes on the prize.”

Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is grabbed off the street by Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy), a young genius who says he is Barkley's illegitimate half-brother. The timing is deliberate: Barkley's father, Eli (Alan Rickman), has just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Thaddeus wants a ransom large enough to hurt him. Randall Miller plays the family's vanity and resentments as dark comedy, with Rickman's pomposity as the house the story is built around.