Movie Review: 'Tesla' Gets Experimental

There are numerous references to the life and work of Nikola Tesla all over the pop culture landscape. Whether directors are portraying Tesla’s life caught between the twin towers of Edison and Westinghouse, The Current War, or comic book writers are having Tesla fight Superman, it’s fair to say that Tesla’s work captured many an imagination. Director Michael Almereyda is merely the latest in a long line who fancied telling Tesla’s tale.

Tesla stars Ethan Hawke in the titular role of Nikola Tesla. The film follows Tesla’s life from his several month stint working in frustration with Thomas Edison (Kyle McLachlan) before moving to Westinghouse where he came under the wing of George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan) who would take advantage of Tesla’s genius for electricity and his naivete about business and finances.

It is while working with Westinghouse that Tesla experienced his most success, harnessing the power of alternating current to power large portions of the country. Tesla would make a fortune, or he would have if he hadn’t been so single minded and obsessed with his inventions and his ambition to bring affordable power to everyone. People are portrayed as having tried to warn Tesla that the market doesn’t take kindly to those with no concept of value but he refuses to see the larger picture.

One of those who warned Tesla and is portrayed as wishing they could have done more for him is Ann Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of legendary industrialist J.P Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz). It is eventually J.P Morgan who would seed Tesla $150,000 dollars that Nikola would spend on creating his remarkable Tesla Coil. Unfortunately, the coil, which is capable of recreating lightning proved to have little practical use and is today a demonstration model for the most part.

Tesla is portrayed as almost Gollum-esque in his pursuit of the coil and harnessing what he believed to be the ultimate power of the Earth. He was sadly born with no wit for how to make a practical use of his many inventions. A dreamer by nature, Tesla is portrayed as trusting, meticulous, and somewhere on the autism spectrum in his awkwardness and his seeming aversion to being touched.

Whether Tesla was on the autism scale may never be known but Ethan Hawke lays on the Hollywood tropes of autism rather thick. Hawke’s performance is compelling and at times enthralling but the best parts are mostly near the end and by then I had wearied of Hawke’s barely audible speech, constant ill at ease manner and ant-charisma His Tesla is a tortured genius and that tortured part of him that is unable to connect with Anne Morgan or anyone else, also applies to us in the audience. He’s hard to connect with.

On the bright side, I did enjoy the stylistic touches that Director Michael Almereyda brings to the story of Tesla. Not content with a straight ahead biopic, Almereyda employs Eve Hewson’s Anne Morgan as an unreliable narrator. Anne is on hand to deliver colorful exposition that includes scenes from the life of Nicola Tesla that never occurred, such as an ice cream crushing incident between Tesla and Edison.

Anne also incorporates modern fantasy into the life story of Tesla. The first time we meet Anne, she’s seated next to a Tesla Coil with a laptop while wearing 19th century fashion. Later during her fanciful story about Edison and Tesla, we see Edison whip out an IPhone and begin scrolling away. Why? I’m assuming Almereyda is visually making the case that these devices would not exist without Nikola Tesla and thus a slightly heightened version of his life story could include such anomalies as allusions to Tesla’s continuing influence.

There is one more bit of outlandish stylishness in Tesla but I don’t want to spoil the moment. It’s so crazy and out of place that you must experience it for yourself to be sure that a scene this odd and misguided appeared in this movie. I say odd and misguided but I did actually kind of dig the craziness of this moment. It’s such a ludicrously bold inclusion that I can’t help but admire the director’s courage in including it.

Tesla is available to stream on Friday, August 21st from IFC films.