102 min | PG-13 | August 21, 2020 | IFC Films
Ethan Hawke plays Nikola Tesla as a man too far inside his own head to win the war he started. Michael Almereyda builds a biopic that keeps tripping its own period costume on roller skates and smartphones. The result is a brilliant man rendered as a closed door.
Nikola Tesla invents the alternating current that powers the modern world and dies broke and forgotten. Michael Almereyda turns that arc into an essay film rather than a biopic. The narrator, Anne Morgan, addresses the camera and Googles her subjects in front of us. She tells us what the historical record says and then admits the record is wrong. The film is not about Tesla’s inventions. It is about the gap between a man’s genius and his inability to live inside the world he is rebuilding.
Ethan Hawke plays Tesla as a wall. He keeps his voice low and his face still and lets the silence do the acting. This is a performance built on withholding. Kyle MacLachlan plays Thomas Edison as a sharp, transactional showman who treats invention as commerce. Jim Gaffigan plays George Westinghouse with a salesman’s warmth that masks the ruthlessness underneath. Eve Hewson plays Anne Morgan as the only person in the film who can see Tesla clearly, which makes her narration the closest thing to a heart.
Almereyda writes and directs with deliberate anachronism as his central device. Characters use laptops in 1890s parlors. Tesla and Edison smear ice cream cones at each other in a fight that never happened. Late in the film Hawke picks up a microphone and sings a karaoke number. Sean Price Williams shoots the interiors in flat, painterly light against rear-projection backdrops that announce themselves as fake. The artifice is the argument. Almereyda refuses to pretend the past is recoverable and films it as a stage set instead.
The trouble is that the device keeps the audience at the same distance Tesla keeps everyone else. The film is cold by design and cold in effect. Every formal gamble lands as an idea rather than a feeling. Hawke and Almereyda build a portrait of a man who could not connect, and they prove the point by making a film that cannot either. It is a fascinating object that holds you at arm’s length and calls the distance the meaning.