Mark Reviews Movies: TESLA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2020

Writer/director Michael Almereyda does try to do something different with his biography of the long-overlooked but recently re-discovered inventor Nikola Tesla, whose research into electricity in the late 19th century almost foresaw our modern world. The man was ahead of his time, so caught up in the possibilities of the future that it was almost certain he would be ignored or dismissed by his contemporaries. With Tesla, Almereyda doesn't just acknowledge the scientist's forward-thinking ways. He attempts to bring the actual future, which Tesla never had a chance to see, into the man's story.

It's a fascinating idea, enough so that one wishes the filmmaker had more interest in making it a fundamental aspect of this story—and less in hitting all of the required beats of a simple biography. Here, we have the story's narrator, one of the women who dared to love a man who was only in love with his work, interrupting the narrative to do a quick internet search on the figures of the story. For example, Thomas Edison, Tesla's rival in the battle for which type of electrical current would become the dominant one, brings back tens of millions of search results and plenty of images of the man.

Our protagonist, meanwhile, returns millions of results, although significantly fewer than the most famous American inventor, and only a few pictures—most of them using the same photograph but adding some artistic flourishes. History has been kinder to Edison than he probably deserved and deserves. Tesla (played with a constant dream-like stare toward unseen distances of time and space by Ethan Hawke), this tale's hero and the man who has since become re-evaluated as one of the great thinkers of history, is still lingering in comparative obscurity.

In raising the point and by way of assorted quirks in the storytelling, Almereyda pretty much makes his intentions clear. He's not just here to convey history. He's here to put it in a new context and—at times, quite literally—re-write it.

The movie gives us this, for sure, in big and small ways—from Edison (played by Kyle MacLachlan) pulling out a modern cellphone after participating in a meeting that the movie acknowledges never happened, to the extensive and intentionally obvious use of painted or photographic backdrops and rear projection, to a climactic moment in which Tesla participates in karaoke, singing a song that was released more than 40 years after his death. That's not even mentioning the scene in which Tesla and Edison get into a disagreement over money. The scene probably happened, but it didn't, as our narrator acknowledges before letting it replay as it more likely happened, involve each man smashing an ice cream cone into the other's face.

Such quirks are cheekily amusing and, more importantly, a reminder that Almereyda is toying with history, in order to re-shape our understanding of it. The real question, though, is what new understanding all of this playing with history actually achieves. Do we come away from the movie with a newfound or deeper understanding of the man and his work, or has Almereyda simply introduced some bold ideas into the usual formula of the biography?

It often and ultimately feels as if the second question provides the answer to the movie's execution and effectiveness. The narrator is Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the youngest daughter of banker J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz), who comes to love the man—but has to compete with the allure of his own mind and the more tangible appeal of famous actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan). Aside from the web searches and some quick-as-a-flash biographies of the supporting characters, she takes us through Tesla's life.

We see his time working for Edison and move through his partnership with George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan), as the two fight to have alternating current defeat Edison's direct type. The story shifts into his mysterious and still inexplicable experiments with electricity in Colorado Springs, before arriving at his financial downfall at the height of his inventive ambitions.

In general, Almereyda doesn't rush the story, allowing for essential facts and vital points of conflict to emerge and run their course. Still, though, it certainly feels as if the filmmaker is in a rush to get as many details as possible into this narrative. We're left, above all else, with a strong and indeed overwhelming impression that Tesla's goals—to create power sources and communication technologies that could be accessible to everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status or location in the world—run counter to men like Edison, Westinghouse, and eventually Morgan. They only see such resources in terms of how much they can personally profit the individual entrepreneur.

We get less of an impression of Tesla, the man (Some flashbacks to his childhood, his conflicts with powerful men, and his temporary romantic interests are about the sum of it) and the inventor (The scenes in Colorado do have a hauntingly mystical, enigmatic quality, as they just watch what looks like magic made with and from lightning). Almereyda only occasionally gives us a sense of the man's optimistic genius (One montage, juxtaposing Tesla awing an audience with wireless power and Edison arguing how to electrocute a man, speaks volumes). In the end, Tesla tells us a lot about its subject but doesn't make us feel too much about him.

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