‘Tesla’ Breaks Every Biopic Rule

If there’s one kind of movie that bores me the most, it’s the by-the-numbers biopic, which often plays like creatives formed the script by glancing at a Wikipedia page. You can forget most biopics about incredibly famous people; most of the time, they boil down to “watch this famous person do the famous thing you know.” (No, I don’t care that the Live Aid performance in Bohemian Rhapsody is nearly identical to the real thing. Relax about it.) I’ve also grown unbelievably jaded towards the number of actors praised for performances only a few steps away from Jason Sudeikis’ Joe Biden impersonation on SNL.

Truth is, this kind of framework breeds nothing but artificiality. These movies claim to seek the answer to the question such as, “what was this person really like?” when they ultimately do nothing but act as glorified clip shows and confirm the idea that we’ll never understand who these people were in real life. Most of the time, the best biopics are made about people who don’t have a strong relationship with the public, allowing filmmakers to add an extra bit of creativity and mess with the form. (A recent favorite of mine is Josephine Decker’s Shirley, a biopic on writer Shirley Jackson, which is devilishly elusive and strange.) I ache for biopics to mess around with their famous subjects.

So, when an ice cream fight broke out shortly into Tesla, I was immediately intrigued.

The Myth of the Great Man

Tesla shares a similar outline with some of the most paint-by-numbers biopics: we watch as Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) rises to prominence as he works on his idea of funneling electricity through alternating currents, meeting other industry titans (Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, George Westinghouse, to name a few) along the way. In other words, we follow the journey of a supposedly great man as he comes in contact with other supposedly great men. That is until Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson) comes onscreen and discusses the results you get searching for Tesla on Google. Quickly, Tesla makes it clear this story is something postmodern, and the accepted rules of recounting a historical figure’s life will not come into play.

More accurately, the movie turns into a farce. Director Michael Almereyda (his last movie, Marjorie Prime, is crushingly underrated) does whatever he can to undercut generic biopic tropes. When it’s finally time for Tesla to make his grand speech about his invention, a scene that would normally be the actor’s “Oscar moment”, Hawke stands up and meekly says he doesn’t have much to say.

Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of Tesla is actually the opposite of what you’d expect; essentially, he’s a pretty miserable, anti-social guy who only wants to escape further into his mind and refine his ideas. So, entirely different from David Bowie’s iconic turn as the engineer in The Prestige. He has no desire to find a woman or create his own myth, which seems like a rebuke against the general desire to elevate notable historical figures to icon status. He only wanted to create. Any attempt to mythologize him is pretty silly, and, ultimately, pretty pointless. So what’s the point in building up a man who clearly had no interest in it himself? Instead, let’s watch Thomas Edison whip out his cell phone!

Tearing It All Down

Hawke’s accent is all over the place, even changing in the middle of sentences. The same goes for Kyle MacLachlan’s Thomas Edison and Jim Gaffigan’s George Westinghouse (unbelievable casting choices, if you ask me). It plays like Almereyda gave completely different character directions depending on the scene. Normally, that’s just shabby, but in the case of Tesla, the consistent inconsistency shatters the film’s artifice, breaking all notions of earnestness. In a strange way, such an odd approach still captures the essence of Tesla, who is always framed as a man out of time and place.

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