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Ethan Hawke plays visionary Nikola Tesla on Michael Almereyda’s meditative antibiotic.
By A.O. Scott
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When we see Nikola Tesla for the first time, he is on skates, heading with dignified caution on a marble floor, a kind of Golden Age collection. It’s 1893. Later, though a few years earlier in the looping timeline of Michael Almereyda’s new film, Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison, his rival and former employer, confront the ice cones. At some other time, our narrator, Anne Morgan (daughter of tough financier J. Pierpont Morgan), opens a computer to compare the effects of a Google search on Tesla and Edison. These capricious moments of hypothesis and anachronism remind us that “Tesla”, which narrates a very important time in the life of the inventor, is a traditional biographical film.
Thank God for that. My own online surveys have provided me with the desirable knowledge (for me, at least) that Telsa and I share a birthday, as well as a large Wikipedia page committed to “Nikola Tesla in popular culture”. Although uns difficult to understand in his life, Tesla, which was born in what is now Croatia in 1856 and died in a New York hotel in 1943, has in recent decades been a staple of the great nerd pantheon. He bequeathed his call to an electric car. David Bowie starred in a Christopher Nolan film.
The mystique comes from the feeling that Tesla has moved forward, at least in theory, to much of the generation that amazes us and we are now complaining about, adding global wireless communication. But as Anne Morgan points out, very few photographs of him will appear when you Google him, and he maintains a tenacious mystery.
Almereyda, a particularly cerebral filmmaker who thinks of shocking and elusive images, is not so much looking to solve the riddle as to locate new tactics to articulate it. Ethan Hawke, with a dark face and a big moustache, impersonating Tesla as a restless soul full of genius and haunted by melancholy. A less imaginative film has attempted to insinuate this pain to a childhood source, or identify a link between Tesla’s saturnine temperament and its volatile career. But the character, in Hawke’s silently magnetic performance, is neither a heroic visionary nor a tragic hero. It’s a state of mind.
The film follows its dark evolution from Edison’s studio to the 1893 World’s Fair, then to Colorado and Long Island, where Tesla pursues giant and esoteric ideas. Along the way, attract and alienate allies, investors and potential lovers. A flash of romantic interest passes between him and Anne (Eve Hewson), but she is not strong enough to melt Tesla’s commitment to loneliness and chastity. It also draws the radiant attention of actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who, like him, seems like a prophetic figure in a world in complete modernization, an avatar of the nascent culture of celebrities that will expand through new technologies.
Tesla basically lives in its own head, and “Tesla” offers an intriguing and infrequent incursion to its creator’s brain. He is less involved with the drama of his subject’s life or his imaginable interactions with other ancient figures than with Almereyda’s mind, about fame, physics, capitalism and the myriad of other disorders that float in the film like moths, with Tesla as the brilliant enigma. that attracts them. Ideas are not provided as topics of conversation, but rather as motives, a ballast for striking and expressively shadowy compositions that the director and his cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, have shaped, occasionally using paintings and photographs as backgrounds.
The elliptical story receives a shock spark, and spirit, through the frenzy between Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and Tesla. The feud between his approaches to electrification was the subject of some other recent film, “The Current War” through Alfonso Gómez-Rejón, which highlighted the advertising festival between Edison and George Westinghouse. (These wrestling marketers were performed through Benedict Cumberbatch and James Shannon, with Nicholas Hoult in a supporting role as an egg-headed tesla.) Here, despite Jim Gaffigan’s impressive turn as Westinghouse, the most powerful power flows between Hawke and MacLachlan.
For Almereyda’s followers, their adjustment is a welcome encounter. In the director’s glorious “Hamlet” (2000), Hawke played the dark main character, while MacLachlan was a disarm claudic claudic, his father-in-law, and his nemesis. Here, the rhetoric is not so great, what is at stake is less explained and the actors lightly contribute their borrowed personality. You may not be informed of everything you want to know about Tesla, that’s what the Internet is for, and you’ll still feel enlightened through your presence.
Tesla rated PG-13. Some shocks. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or shop on iTunes, Google Play and streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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