Review by Reid Ramsey
Everybody wants to rule the world.
So sang Tears For Fears on their 1985 pop hit of the same name, and so posits filmmaker Michael Almereyda, both subtextually and textually in his new film Tesla, starring Ethan Hawke as the famed inventor Nikola Tesla. Beginning this review with lyrics from an 80s pop song may not seem the most conventional approach to discussing a 19th century-set biopic, but Almereyda’s approach to telling Tesla’s story is not the most conventional either. This decades-in-the-works film doesn’t set out to be the most accurate portrayal of the inventor’s life — seeing as the narrator of the film, Ann Morgan (Eve Hewson), directly discredits events of the film as they’re occurring — but it does set out to be an honest portrayal of Tesla’s psyche, ambition, and eventual destruction. In this mission, it is quite successful.
Tesla shows the inventor as a man torn across time. His working years may span from the late 19th century to the early 20th, but he is constantly glimpsing the 21st century. Ann Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, lives alongside Tesla and is initially interested in him. As the narrator, though, Ann flips through PowerPoint presentations and combs through Google searches of the names “Tesla,” “Edison,” and “Westinghouse,” to determine the fame and impact of each of the three inventors. Tesla, himself, is working to run wireless electrical current and communication across the entire world, foreseeing the internet and cell phones. One of the film’s more obvious links to the present is when Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) sits down at a saloon bar and begins scrolling his iPhone. The film may primarily show Tesla’s struggles and failures, but Almereyda designates him as a technological voice that should have been echoed throughout history in the same way Edison has been.
Hawke, having experienced a bit of a renaissance the past few years, plays Tesla with less verve and charisma than he usually puts into roles. Tesla is introspective, arrogant, and thoughtless in personal relationships, and Hawke commits to getting these attributes right. It is only towards the end of the film, though, that Hawke truly shines as Tesla skates towards irrelevance and becomes more of a laughingstock in the field he pioneered. Hawke’s communicative eyes stop consternating and begin to widen and spill out his deeply-held beliefs that threaten his funding, such as “Alien life is a statistical probability.”
What the filmmakers do best, though, is their commitment to the style. The soundscape and set-design are wonderfully constructed. For many of the shots, including most exteriors, the actors are positioned against what appear to be rear-projected backdrops. The distances between the camera, the actor, and the screen behind them give a dizzying sort of memory effect in which the characters, themselves, cannot even adequately access what are now fuzzy memories. The story is also mostly told in vignettes. This style, along with the inclusion of both classical and pop music, bring to mind a few other bizarre biopics like Jackie and Marie Antoinette.
As a viewer, this type of filmmaking is honestly thrilling. Everything is just so constructed. In an age where movies and TV try their hardest to reflect some sense of reality, Tesla is not at all interested in that reflection. Almereyda and his team want to reflect the fractured inner-mind of their main character, not just retell his life as a movie. It could be the fact that I haven’t been to a theater in months, but my eyes could not get enough of Almereyda’s construction. It is not necessarily a loud movie, but it is a big movie.
Tesla’s massive claim as an inventor was the harnessing of alternating current electricity. As Edison explains at one point in the film: if direct current electricity is like a river running one way, then alternating current is like a river running one way for a certain period of time and then turning back and running the opposite way for a certain period of time. Edison and Tesla’s lives in the film are told parallel to the type of electricity they champion. Edison’s life is straightforward; whereas Tesla’s, especially in this movie’s telling, flows back and forth from success to failure to success, oscillating between being a capitalist and a socialist, and ultimately having far fewer Google results than his widely-known rival, Edison.