Tesla: A biopic with no spark to speak of, and one of the least dynamic performances of Ethan Hawke's career
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
Static… low energy… no spark to speak of. A weak biopic of Nicola Tesla, the man who defined our electric lives, practically begs for shameful puns. For that, I apologize.
But the disappointment is palpable in Michael Almereyda’s wannabe cutting-edge Tesla, which elicits perhaps the least dynamic performance of Ethan Hawke’s career.
Ethan Hawke is the misunderstood genius and electrical pioneer Nicola Tesla in Tesla
It’s not that writer-director Almereyda is at a loss for genre bending ideas in attempting to flesh out the most influential scientist of the gilded age, about whom relatively little is known. Rather than plant his feet firmly in the past, his film is awash in deliberate anachronisms, a robber baron suddenly pulling out a smart phone in a bar, an out-of-the-blue karaoke scene involving Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule The World.
And throughout, Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of robber-baron J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz), narrates from the present in a monotonous voice about how little a Google search reveals of the movie’s subject, and teasingly comments on whether scenes we’ve just watched actually happened or were made up to fill the narrative void or to provide ironic counterpoint to real events.
Too clever by half, these gimmicks tend to underscore how little thought seems to have been put into offering us believable characters instead of caricatures. Most effectively played by David Bowie in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Tesla was a man so feverishly propelled by ideas that he spent the later years of his career developing death rays, imagining ways to translate human thought, and claiming to have received messages from Mars. Those details are there, but the passion behind them is not evident.
As history dictates, of course, the movie lives mainly in the period of Tesla’s life when his career overlapped with that of the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison (played as a thieving, amoral self-promotor by Kyle MacLachlan). Their war over the adaptation of Tesla’s AC current versus Edison’s DC as the societal standard was a defining moment of both men’s lives. Tesla won, sort of, with the help of electrical pioneer George Westinghouse (played by Jim Gaffigan with a glued-on walrus moustache the size of a dust mop), who was ultimately not a man to be trusted either.
There are episodes that could have been expanded, including the disastrous first attempt to adapt AC current to electric chair executions, or his mishandled race with Marconi to successfully send the first wireless signals.
Others, like Tesla’s protracted quasi-relationship with the actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) seem to lack a point, other than the inventor’s social dysfunction in dealing with women in his life (including Anne).
If there is an overall theme here, it is that visionaries are often not the ones who profit from their own visions. Sad but true, but not exactly novel. J.P. Morgan sows the seeds of Tesla’s own career demise by (deliberately?) giving him too small an investment, $100,000, to bring his projects to fruition – an amount we’re informed was identical to what he’d paid, twice, for paintings by Vermeer. The money, so important to the world-changing inventor, is a trifle to Morgan.
Like Tesla himself, Almereyda may have had too many ideas competing for attention in his head to realize most of them. The result is a kind of noble failure.
Tesla. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda. Starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan and Eve Hewson. Available on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray, Tuesday, September 22.