Tesla (Michael Almereyda, 2020) (Patreon)

Although Tesla bears a certain resemblance to Experimenter, Michael Almereyda's biography of Stanley Milgram, the new film is only a shadow of that recent triumph. Like Experimenter, Tesla engages in a kind of Brechtian retcon of the twentieth century, not so much changing the facts are recontextualizing our understanding of them. At first, Tesla appears to thoroughly buy in to the common romanticized interpretation of its subject, inventor Nicola Tesla (Ethan Hawke), as a renegade and a visionary who was crushed by American capitalism, embodied in its best/worst form by Thomas Edison (Kyle McLachlan). In fact, the characterization of Tesla, as a dreamer who cannot get his visions properly bankrolled, initially suggests that Almereyda may be using the benighted scientist to produce a crypto-autobiography.

But Tesla swerves and parries in a number of different directions. Through the often direct-to-camera narration of Tesla's would-be love interest Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), Almereyda suggests that Tesla frequently sabotaged himself, through impulsively bad decisions, poor judgment, inconsistent follow-through, and what now might be interpreted as neuroatypical behavior that made him unfit for navigating early 20th century American capital, with its emphasis on swagger and showmanship. 

Nevertheless, Tesla overplays its hand in a number of ways. Morgan -- the daughter of financier / electricity investor J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz) -- is often used as the mouthpiece for capitalist values, private ownership, and the supposed idiocy of Tesla's dream of free energy, despite the fact that she was in fact a radical advocate of organized labor and feminism, unlikely to have trumpeted Edisonian market values. And Tesla himself, as portrayed by Hawke in a disappointingly misjudged performance, bumbles through each and every situation like a mustachioed slow loris in a European suit, wide-eyed and confused at the basics of human behavior. 

This attempted complication of the Tesla myth actually oversimplifies it. Almereyda provides us with exactly two choices -- martyr or fool -- and allows us the complexity of assigning a position on that sliding scale. Compare this with Experimenter, where his portrait of Milgram is complicated by clear historical exigencies, the scientist's driving need to understand how obedience is cultivated as the world emerges from the shadow of authoritarianism. 

By contrast, Tesla tends to proceed by sharing the tacit social reservations of its subject. Almereyda refrains from explaining Tesla's projects because, like the character himself, he assumes we wouldn't understand. The result is an oddly hermetic film, one that is as much about broad generalities -- the dangers of compromise, the difficulties of being a misfit -- as about its ostensible subject. Ironically enough, Tesla's alternating viewpoints are not as illuminating as Almereyda seems to think they are. He might have benefited from being a bit more direct.