Tesla (2020)

Directed by: Michael Almereyda | 102 minutes | biography, drama | Actors: Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Eli A. Smith, Josh Hamilton, Lucy Walters, Luna Jokic, Kyle MacLachlan, Dan Bittner, David Kallaway, Karl Geary, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Nicholas Wuehrmann, Haley Elise Pehrson, Tony Hutaj, Corban Elwick-Schermitz, Emory Gleeson, Hannah Gross

The eventful life of physicist, electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla appeals enormously to the imagination, especially because somewhere in it lies the answer to the mystery of an unfulfilled promise. This Serbian migrant from the former Austrian-Hungary turned out to be a brilliant inventor in the United States after a difficult period with several hundred patents to his name. For a time he stood in the shadow of his former employer Thomas Edison. Edison, who in his day was many times more popular and successful than Tesla, as a shrewd businessman knew how to sell his work much better. After even earning his living for a while as a simple manual laborer, Tesla takes revenge with the invention of the coil transformer named after himself and the use of efficient alternating current.

A fictional character in stories, Tesla occasionally pops up as a mysterious lightning charmer who conducts bizarre experiments beyond imagination in a huge barn in remote Colorado Springs. David Bowie’s portrayal in ‘The Prestige’ (2006) is undoubtedly the most memorable of these. It is the Tesla that is either too ingenious for this world, or is slowly getting off track. His name is left with the question of what would have happened if his lenders hadn’t lost faith in him, and his wondrous ideas — such as using extremely low electromagnetic waves for a global wireless communications system — had become a reality.

The fact that director Michael Almereyda wants to show a possibly more realistic Nikola Tesla with ‘Tesla’ (2020) is commendable, it is only a pity that all the sjeu has disappeared. Ethan Hawke seems cut out for the role, but his flat playing portrays Tesla as a constantly constipated autist. He does not make it more insightful, nor more comprehensible, and does not give the viewer the feeling that something is at stake. As a feature film, ‘Tesla’ never really takes off and is dangerously close to what can also be an easy-going documentary. Easy going because in terms of dry facts we are not getting much wiser either.

Funny finds, such as comparing the popularity of Tesla and competitors in numbers of Google search results, and the absurd scene in which Tesla sings ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ by Tears for Fears, do not hide the fact that Almereyda does not know what to do with the person of Nikola Tesla. And even Kyle MacLachlan occasionally stealing the show as Thomas Edison isn’t enough.