Review: Tesla

Ethan Hawke stars as Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, in a biopic narrated by Anne (Eve Hewson), the daughter of George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan). The film chronicles Tesla’s dealings with the likes of Westinghouse, egotistical Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz).

 

The kind of unconventional, ‘innovative’ biopic that you’ll either go with or entirely resist, this 2020 film about the infamous inventor comes from writer-director Michael Almereyda (who made the arty vampire flick “Nadja” back in 1994). I very, very much resisted just about every frame of it. Wasting decent performances by Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan, the writer-director gets in the way of his own period story with asides featuring a laptop, the internet, and most embarrassingly of all, Hawke as Tesla performing Tears for Fears’ 80s hit ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’. At one point, a character seen using the internet in the modern asides then becomes a character in the period story, too (played by Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson in an irritating performance). It makes me think that the show-off direction in the similarly themed “The Current War” wasn’t so bad after all. Just because the film is about an innovator doesn’t mean you can make modern intrusions into a period story. I get it, Tesla was a forward-thinker etc., but narratively it’s just completely wrong to me. I guess I’m a bit of a traditionalist that way. The story of Nikola Tesla is already fascinating, he was a fascinating and rather brilliant person. The story can tell itself.

 

I get that some people might like daring, experimental, and non-traditional biopics. Great, you might like this. I generally don’t and definitely didn’t. Individual parts of it are interesting, but it’s all for nought because the filmmaker kept me at a very remote (and annoyed) distance. A failed experiment from a frankly arrogant filmmaker.

 

Rating: D+