Review: Tesla (2020)

It’s clear that director Michael Almereyda has no interest in pretending a film can present historical fact. He frequently breaks the fourth wall and frustrates cinematic convention by incorporating anachronisms or highlighting the constructed, artificiality of film scenes. He did this to good effect in 2015’s Experimenter, which charted Stanley Milgrim’s famous and controversial psychological experiments. He’s continued this approach in Tesla, an arch biopic starring Ethan Hawke as the famous Serbian-American inventor.

In some ways, Tesla resembles a conventional biopic. It follows Nikola Tesla’s life over the course of several decades, starting when he was just an engineer working for Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and continuing through his pioneering of Alternating Current with George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan) and eventually his experimental work with wireless power in Colorado. There are recreations of key moments in Tesla’s life, such as the moment he quit working for Edison and the moment he foolishly decided to void his contract to George Westinghouse in order to do the titan of industry a favour in terms of negotiations. These scenes are dramatically crafted and the actors amplify their significance in their performances.

But in other, more interesting ways, the film deviates from the norm. The overall structure resembles that of a normal biopic, but Almereyda continuously asks the viewer to take a step back from the story of Tesla’s life and ponder why we’re interested in him and the type of story he embodies. The film is narrated by Eve Hewson (daughter of U2 frontman, Bono), who also plays Anne Morgan, friend of Tesla’s and daughter of J.P. Morgan, who was once the richest man in the world. Anne is present in scenes, interacting with Tesla and other characters, but Almereyda also gives her her own scenes, functioning as the chorus reflecting on past moments we just witnessed or musing about Tesla’s motivations. At certain points, Almereyda has her look up the amount of Google search results for various characters in the story, pointing out that Edison gets more results than Tesla, and that the majority of Tesla’s results are just variations on the same four photographs of him in existence.

Almereyda knows that he cannot capture the true essence of an enigmatic figure like Tesla, so instead of trying to convince us he’s managed to capture some inherent truth on screen, he instead leans into the artificiality of the story to force us to contemplate Tesla and his legacy. Sometimes this is stilted, awkward even; a late moment in the film features Hawke’s Tesla approach a microphone and sing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears, ironically showing how Tesla proved the lyrics of the song wrong, unlike the titans around him, and therein lied his financial ruin. It’s an arresting moment, but undeniably bizarre—perhaps even “stupid”, as my wife thought it when catching a glimpse of it from the other side of the room.

But other moments are endearing, even lovely. The film is low budget and so when a scene takes place at a train station or on a sweeping hillside, Almereyda foregoes expensive location shooting and instead places the actor in front of a rear projection of the setting. He uses black-and-white photographs of old train stations or grainy old footage of a prairie field. The actors pretend they’re in the real setting, but Almereyda does nothing to disguise the shadow falling on the rear projection screen or to eliminate the two-dimensional effect of the presentation. It’s a stilted effect, but instead of seeming cheap, it captures a certain iconography of the past. In a way, it resembles the popular conception of how the past looked based on what we’ve seen of old sepia-toned photographs and 18-frames-per-second footage more than the slick productions of most contemporary historical movies. It literally places the characters into idealized recreations of how we think the past was.

In a sense, the film’s entire approach is an attempt to defamiliarize the conventions of the biopic and capture a different essence of an important historical individual; in this case, Nikola Tesla’s inscrutability and almost spiritual kinship with the machines he made. Strangely for a biopic, the film keeps its central character at a distance. We get Anne Morgan pondering upon Tesla and we get key scenes from his life, but we’re never truly allowed inside his mind. Ethan Hawke tones down his natural charisma and disappears inside his own skin. He always makes eye contact with the actors around him, but his eyes are the only parts of him that seem engaged; physically, he seems slouched inward and always thinking about something outside of the current moment.

In terms of character, the film is almost more interesting as a portrait of Thomas Edison, who Kyle MacLachlan plays as a faux-cheerful narcissist who is endlessly hungry for the next conquest. He’s amiable, but only to a point, and behind MacLachlan’s quizzable smile (so famous from Twin Peaks) lies a calculation that looks for weaknesses and how to exploit them. It’s a fascinating performance, both charismatic and a bit dangerous, exuding energy and confidence in a way that Hawke completely foregoes.

We learn more about Tesla by comparing him to Edison than we do in any scene with Tesla alone. In the end, such a disarming approach to the biopic can only go so far. Michael Almereyda is a fascinating director who circumvents his limited resources by leaning into novel approaches to formal and narrative presentation. The film is never uninteresting and rarely dips into the sleepy biography of most biopics, but what does it really tell us about Tesla? I’m unsure of the answer, since the film presents him as essentially unknowable and then proceeds to skirt the issue in interesting ways. It’s true that no film can capture the essence of a person, but I’m not sure Almereyda is even interested in trying. Therein lies the central tension of Tesla. It’s a biopic without an interest in biography.

6 out of 10

Tesla (2020, USA)

Written and directed by Michael Almereyda; starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson, Jim Gaffigan, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Hannah Gross, Josh Hamilton, Peter Greene.

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