Ethan Hawke and Eve Hewson in Tesla.
Photo: IFC Films
I knew it Tesla would not be an ordinary biopic if it opened on Ethan Hawke’s Nikola Tesla role-skating after Wojciech Kilar’s score to Jane Campion’s Portrait of a lady, while a voice-over informed us that, after learning that the sparks evoked by punishing his cat were the same as lightning in the air, a 7-year-old Tesla had asked her: ‘Is nature a giant cat? And if so, who’s stretching their backs? Director Michael Almereyda loves dissonance: Not long after that opening sentence, we see turn-of-the-century philanthropist Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson) looking at the camera, opening a laptop, and searching Google for “Nikola Tesla.” will she look for “Thomas Edison.”) And what about an extended Tesla sequel that sings Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”? I love it, but I do not quite know what to make of it – what I could say about the whole part of this bizarre, enchanting film.
TeslaHowever, the sharpest turns are not narrative or temporary. They are thematic and tonal, and that question about who stretches nature’s back is not just a fun anecdote. Invention, for Tesla, is not about creating new things, but about unleashing the latent mysteries of the universe. He does not build as much as discovering, channeling, exploring. Over and over again, the dialogue strikes us with these ideas. Invisible gears and engines push and echo in the background of almost every scene. Earth as mind, Earth as animal, Earth as machine, or perhaps Earth as mind-machine-animal – this is perhaps the most animated film ever made about scientists.
Never one to tell a story directly, Almereyda (whose Stanley Milgram biopic 2015 is Experiment was finally offbeat, if not quite so strangely dismissed) solemnly beats some of the important events in Tesla’s life: his brief early employment under Thomas Edison (a smug confidant Kyle MacLachlan) and his lifelong rivalry with the inventor, his partnership with George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan) to produce and mark his revolutionary induction motor, as well as his move to Colorado Springs to experiment with sending electricity around the world wirelessly. The film also expands and speculates about Tesla’s long-running relationship with Morgan (daughter of JP Morgan) and his obsession with legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan, who shoots Almereyda as if she were her own paradoxically liberating-intoxicating, techno-natural Earth-machine force: At one point we see her enter a room after a beating disco beat, a very contemporary look behind her, as she brings modernity even with her).
Despite the monotony of its patents and inventions, Tesla was never good with money, or with contracts, or with self-promotion. Westinghouse benefited from it, while Edison blew past as a businessman with an inferior product. Tesla let him get used to it, he ruined fortune, and he found that his noble intentions were intoxicated. His ideas about wireless transmission were obviously prophetic, hence laptops and all the other random anachronistic doodads that populated the film, but his vision also had a dark side. In Colorado, we see Tesla framed against majestic landscapes – mountains and ranches and forests – most are clearly false, projections against which Hawke stands awkwardly. Almereyda never tries to cover up such imperfect effects. After all, he enjoys them. That’s a sensible way for the director to get his limited budget round, but it also speaks to a kind of stranger who will come in full circle when we all end up going wireless.
Tesla talks about the potential use of its induction motor, “That motor will do the work of the world. It will set men free.” Hawke delivers the lines like both a prophet and a ghostly man (which I think is another way to a prophet). Tesla sees a continuum between the unlocking of power already in nature and the democratic use of that power, but perhaps he also sees, or perhaps intuitively understands, that once these forces are disconnected, they are exploited by those with less noble goals.He himself is both a seer and guinea pig, poster child and cautious story.That may be why we find our hero on stage, mic in hand, singing Tears for Fears’ synthesizer- heavy New Wave hit on corruption and disarmament and pollution near the end of the film.Technology makes both creation and destruction easier.The more we discover about the world, the film seems to say, the further we get from it.Ultimately we are Still just left with our fractured self.
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