Almereyda, a particularly cerebral filmmaker who thinks of captivating, terrifying images, does not intend to solve the riddle in such a way as to find new ways of articulating it. Ethan Hawke, with a gloomy face and a heavy mustache, plays Tesla like a restless soul laden with genius and haunted by manliness. A lesser fantasy film might have tried to trace that sadness to a source in childhood, or to make a connection between Tesla’s saturnine temperament and his restless career. But the character, in Hawke’s silent magnetic performance, is neither a heroic visionary nor a tragic hero. He’s in a mood.
The film follows its brooding progress from Edison’s workshop to the 1893 World Cup, and then continues to Colorado and Long Island, where Tesla pursues ever larger and esoteric ideas. Along the way, he attracts and replaces allies, investors and potential lovers. A flicker of romantic interest runs between him and Anne (Eve Hewson), but it is not strong enough to melt Tesla’s commitment to loneliness and chastity. He also draws the radiant attention of actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who, like him, appears as a prophetic figure in a rapidly modernizing world – an avatar of the emerging celebrity culture that will expand alongside the new technologies.
Tesla lives mostly in his own head, and “Tesla” offers an intriguing and sometimes surprising excursion into his maker’s brain. It has less to do with the drama of the subject’s life than its possible interactions with other historical figures than with Almereyda’s thoughts – about fame, physics, capitalism and the myriad other issues fluttering through the film such as moths, with Tesla as the glowing enigma that attracts them. The ideas do not come as topics of conversation, but rather as motifs, ballast for the arresting, expressively damaged compositions made by the director and his cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, often with paintings and still photographs as backgrounds.
The elliptical story is given a crucial spark of conflict – and wit – by the frenemyship between Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and Tesla. The battle between their approaches to electrification was the subject of another recent film, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s “The Current War”, which emphasized the business competition between Edison and George Westinghouse. (Those fighting entrepreneurs were played by Benedict Cumberbatch and James Shannon, with Nicholas Hoult in a secondary role as the egghead Tesla). Here, despite Jim Gaffigan’s impressively proven turn as Westinghouse, the strongest energy flows between Hawke and MacLachlan.
For Almereyda fans, their pairing is a welcome reunion. In the director’s beautiful ‘Hamlet’, Hawke played the somber title character, while MacLachlan was a disarming human Claudius, his stiffness and nemesis. Here the rhetoric is not so great, the stakes are less sharply defined and the actors carry their borrowed personalities lightly. You may not be able to learn everything there is to know about Tesla – that’s what the Internet is for – but you will still feel enlightened by its presence.
Tesla
Rated PG-13. A few shocks. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
