The new motion picture Tesla, starring Ethan Hawke is one of the latest “prestige” features to be released direct to video [on August 21, 2020] due to covid-related theater closures. As you’d suppose, the film is a biopic about the brilliant electrical engineer/inventor and dreamer of the late 19th and early 20th century, Nikola Tesla - the man who developed and popularized alternating current or AC (which is how most electricity has been supplied to the world for the last 120+ years); who also championed the idea of wireless transmission of electrical power and is generally considered the progenitor of modern wireless communication.
Tesla is perhaps best known for his 1898 victory (along with entrepreneur George Westinghouse) over the most famous and successful inventor of the day, Thomas Edison, in what has come down to us as “the War of the Currents”, which pitted Edison’s DC (direct current) distribution system with an AC production and distribution system designed by Tesla and produced by Westinghouse.
While this episode brought him considerable notoriety and public acclaim, and forms a central part of the new movie, such popular regard did not last. For much of his life Tesla was a forgotten, overlooked genius. Over the last half century or so, however, his vision and accomplishments increasingly have been acknowledged and his reputation enhanced to the point that he is something of a patron saint for the tech innovation crowd. The world’s largest and best-known electric vehicle company is named in his honor as is an up and coming start-up aiming to corner the electric semi truck market {Nikola Corporation].
Although an extremely brainy guy and a prodigious inventor (he obtained something like 300 patents during his lifetime), Nikola Tesla was a terrible businessman. By most accounts and as portrayed in this new film, Tesla was probably on the autism spectrum: socially distant and awkward, living almost exclusively inside his head, and highly focused on his technical and scientific ideas to the exclusion of most else – including practical considerations like business and, more generally, money - except when he needed to find some to fund his experiments. He died in a New York hotel room in 1943, alone and in debt at age 86.
You’d think such a guy and such a life would make a fascinating subject for a movie, and Tesla - the very first narrative feature film about him - IS quite interesting. At the same time, the picture – an odd cross between documentary reenactment and biographical narrative (fiction) film - is problematic in a number of ways. It was written and directed by Michael Almereyda, a director I admire based on his two most recent features, Marjorie Prime (2017) and Experimenter (2015) – each of which is provocative and very watchable (and both of which I highly recommend). Tesla is a harder nut. I can recommend it too, albeit with reservations.
As written and as portrayed by Hawke, Nikola Tesla’s affect is dour and depressive. He says little when much could be said and is mostly impassive throughout, reacting to other people – friend and foe alike – with a disappointingly expressionless mien. Actually, that’s not quite accurate: Hawke’s Nikola Tesla faces the world with a fixed expression, an admixture of several emotional states: concern, anxiety and bewilderment. At particularly fraught moments, a careful observer might note a flicker of an eye or perhaps a subtle physical stiffening suggestive of impatience or emotional discomfort. He admits to living in his head most of the time. As a result, notwithstanding his deep thoughts, the character comes across as something of a dull cipher. I’m a big fan of Ethan Hawke, and such a monotone expression is not his typical style; the closest thing may have been his portrayal of Everett Lewis, the protagonist’s gruff husband in the charming, Maudie (2016). His austere performance as Tesla is, I suspect, a directorial decision rather than the actor’s choice.
And yet, although I did not exactly enjoy this manifestation of Tesla’s character, I have to admit that once I accepted it, it worked. In fact, it formed a deep impression on me such that I can still see and feel him several days later. Poor soul.
Still, it’s left to the other characters to spice things up. First up, there’s Thomas Alva Edison - nicely portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Dune, Desperate Housewives) – already at the time the film is set a mythic popular figure - the genius inventor of the phonograph, the incandescent lightbulb, and other miracles. He also was an unstinting self-promoter and a big shot entrepreneur, the founder and operator of Edison Electric Light Company in New York - later to become General Electric. (He is also a big deal historically - one of the first to apply the principles of industrial organization and teamwork to scientific research and invention at his ballyhooed laboratories in New Jersey.) Edison is cast as Tesla’s nemesis in the film (as in life). Edison is a vivacious, if overbearing, personage and oddly, being that he is the protagonist’s adversary, a more relatable character than Tesla himself.
The culmination of the War of the Currents came when inventor and entrepreneur George Westinghouse - who made his first fortune in the 1870s with the hugely successful Westinghouse Air Brake Company, based on his invention of a revolutionary railroad braking system– teamed up with Tesla in 1893 to win the right to install and operate a system to light up the phenomenal World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Westinghouse’s bid beat out Edison’s, and the project proved highly successful, putting to rest the fake news spread by Edison and others that AC current was unstable and unsafe. Under pressure from banker J.P. Morgan and other backers, Edison threw in the towel on DC power soon after. Westinghouse - actor/comedian Jim Gaffigan (The Jim Gaffigan Show, My Boys) with an astonishingly bushy white stache and mutton chops - is portrayed here as a keen businessman and perhaps also a savvy manipulator – pretending to be a helpful friend and partner, even while taking advantage of naïve Nikola. But the picture can also be read as more complicated than that, with Tesla as a victim of his own profound - even willful - disinterest in business matters. From what I’ve read, the latter interpretation may be closer to the truth. As with Edison, Westinghouse too is a much livelier character than our hero.
Then there is Anne Morgan, an attractive, intelligently inquisitive, young society woman who takes an interest in Tesla. Anne is played by Irish actress Eve Hewson (Bridge of Spies, The Knick), a young up and comer. [Her full name, Memphis Eve Sunny Day Hewson, is pretty cool in a hippie-sort-of-way, but prompts the question: who would do that to a kid? But when you learn that Eve’s parents are U2’s Bono and actress/activist Ali Hewson, all you can say is OK, that figures.] Anyway, Anne is the most significant character in the picture after Tesla himself, and far more engaging. For some reason, she seems to be in love with Tesla and wants to help him; and it certainly adds a little interest to the story for us to anticipate a romantic angle. But he’s not really interested or able to reciprocate her feelings nor amenable to her advice. Anne is an important character, though, because she’s the youngest daughter of banker/financier John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan and, while she has little influence over the great man’s business decisions, she’s at least a point of entrée. And Tesla seems always in need of money to fund his latest ideas.
Speaking of money, Anne’s father, known to intimates by his middle name, Pierpont, also makes an appearance in Tesla, played by Donnie Kesshawarz. Pierpont’s not the old uber-rich codger seen in most portraits of J.P. Morgan, but a vital, uber-rich business tycoon. Although he sees Tesla as something of a weirdo, he’s hardheaded enough to see that the man is pretty damn clever and may be on to something useful – which is to say potentially profitable to Pierpont himself. Late in the story, he cavalierly loans Tesla a hundred grand to help him develop a prototype wireless system – which seems a fortune to our protagonist but is mere chump change to the great money man, who can carelessly shell out far more than that to put on a bash for his well-heeled social set. Tesla, needless to say, doesn’t get this.
Historically, Anne Morgan (1873 – 1952) was, in fact, the youngest of JP’s four children. She may well have been intrigued by Nikola Tesla (as many were for a time), but it is unlikely that she ever engaged in a serious courtship of him. For one thing, it appears that Anne was herself a lesbian. For another, it was widely known that Nikola had no use for and may even have somewhat disdained women. (In this respect, Tesla’s suggestion that world-famous actress/seductress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan)was also interested in our inventor would seem pure fantasy – providing, however, a brief interlude of eye-candy.) In real life, Anne Morgan was a remarkable figure who could be the subject of an interesting biopic of her own. Beginning in the earliest years of the twentieth century, she became a noted and influential philanthropist and social activist, founding social clubs for young women; supporting and working with striking women on behalf of unionizing New York’s garment workers; providing front line aid for non-combatants, especially women and children, in France in the midst of and following the First World War; and much more.
In addition to fictionalizing much of the relationship between Anne Morgan and Tesla, writer-director Almereyda has some fun with her character. So, Anne is also the voice-over narrator of the film, omnisciently filling in the background and connective events left out of the onscreen narrative. This is useful given that the movie covers roughly twenty years of Nikola Tesla’s life in well under two hours. It’s also curiously quirky: Anne-the-narrator is seen working her laptop computer as she references the number of times Edison’s name has been googled compared to Tesla’s and several times fills us in on events that occurred well after her own death. On one occasion, after we’ve seen a fascinating meeting between Edison and Tesla, she informs us that this never actually happened.
Almereyda has more quirks up his sleeve. At one point, Tesla, fed up with the financial power plays that are confounding his scientific ambitions, takes to a solitary stage to sing Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World. This is strangely apt, though wildly anachronistic.
I can and do recommend Tesla, but with some caveats. It is not a mainstream entertainment picture, and certainly not for everyone. It is a slow movie, tedious at times, about an interesting and important person, who unfortunately is afflicted with a difficult, seemingly dull personality. Still, it’s a film that grows on you, if you stick with it.
The film does a good job providing us with a feeling for the scientific and intellectual ferment of the time in which it is set, i.e. late 19th and early 20th century. And a rare glimpse into the strangeness of what it must be like to be someone like Nikola Tesla - a brilliant visionary with both literal and figurative visions of scientific connections that can change the world, but afflicted with a disorder that makes it difficult to connect with or understand the very people who can help bring these ideas and visions to life. Something of a horror show for him, I’d imagine, but fascinating to watch.
As I mentioned earlier, Tesla has left me with an impression of its lachrymose subject that still comes back to me a week after viewing the movie. That’s a good thing, I’d say.
1 hour 42 minutes Rated PG-13 (but likely too slow for kids)
Grade: B
Available to rent from AppleTV, Amazon, Vudu and other streaming services.
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