Michael Almereyda is a filmmaker very interested in making interesting movies about uninteresting men. Judicious use of technical, spatial, and musical anachronism are the tools to energize a humdrum docudrama formula. It didn’t really work with his plodding 2015 Stanley Millgram movie Experimenter, and duplicating the process fails to generate much electricity for Tesla, which stars Ethan Hawke as the brilliant, if morose, inventor.
In theory, Tesla seems like it should be an electric exercise in deconstructive, revisionist history. There’s a ton of fourth-wall-breaking, characters gleefully roller skating their way through scenes, and scene-chewing Kyle MachLachlan as Thomas Edison. But Nikola Tesla, at least as presented by Almereyda, is grim, close-mouthed, and so distant that all of the movie’s weird, fun turns pass right through him, leaving the movie flat and passionless.
Hollywood doesn’t quite seem to know what to make of Nikola Tesla. It’s not for a lack of trying, either. There have been multiple films featuring his engineering genius of late, including 2018’s The Current War; but more often than not it’s always as a background player to the other heavyweights in the field of electric current: Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Tesla’s peers also feature heavily here, with Jim Gaffigan having way too good of a time a the jovial Westinghouse, and Donnie Keshawarz as a grubby JP Morgan. Even in the movie that bears his name, Tesla is crowded-out by their presence.
Almereyda does try to spice things up, though. The movie features Eve Hewson (excellent in The Knick) as Tesla’s friend Anne Morgan (daughter of JP Morgan), breaking the movie’s confines with unironic meta-narration about his legacy as seen through Google searches (he gets significantly fewer views than Edison) and modern updates on his work. She also helps break down the truth about Tesla, but too often her corrections only make the man appear more insular than before. In one such example, Tesla and Edison are having a verbal match over the viability of alternating current over direct current, the rivalry that will define their lives. Rather than continuing it any further, these two intellectual giants decide to just plop ice cream in one another’s faces like children. We’re then told this isn’t at all how this happened, which, of course, we already knew…but it was much better than watching Tesla sit there quietly like a stone Buddha.
Certain points in Tesla’s single-minded vision are touched upon, but nothing is ever given the weight they deserve. We see his unappreciated service while working for Edison, before leaving and struggling for a year as a day laborer. Tesla then finds the benefactors he needs in Morgan and Westinghouse, but he’s always under a cloud of impending failure. Much of the movie amounts to his begging for resources from those who are, basically, his rivals. We see the disastrous first execution by electric chair, a public humiliation which all but destroyed Edison’s championing of direct current. Tesla and Westinghouse’s monumental successes powering the 1893 Worlds Fair could’ve been firm ground to build an entire movie, but is largely a missed opportunity. And then there are the personal relationships: the flirty, lovelorn Anne; Tesla’s loyal assistant Szigeti (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who is just written out one moment to the next; and an apparent fling with renowned French actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), an unfamiliar thing which may just be a fanciful daydream on Tesla’s part.
He does come across as someone with an active inner life, albeit with a complete inability to show that side of himself to others. Cinematographer Sean Price Williams captures visually Tesla’s internal monologue through surreal images under Colorado’s night sky. Using his experiments on the conductivity of low-pressure air as a means of escape from the big city, Tesla indulges in a broader view of the world, beyond his steampunk-style machines and into the natural realm. These rare examinations of the man give Tesla momentary sparks of life, but not enough to push Almereyda’s film into anything more than a biopic curiosity.
