Film Review: TESLA (2020): Entertains While It Takes an Incisive Peek Into the Brilliant Inventor’s Mind

Tesla Review

Tesla (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Michael Almereyda and starring Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Josh Hamilton, Lucy Walters, Kyle MacLachlan, Jim Gaffigan, Donnie Keshawarz, Rebecca Dayan and Jameal Ali.

Michael Almereyda’s Tesla is delightfully imperfect. It does not follow the typical biopic route, tracing a life from birth to death. Nor does it take a particularly linear approach to examining the life of brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke). Rather, the film takes aspects of Tesla’s life – such as his obsession with his projects or his relationship with arch rival Thomas Alva Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) – and brings them to life with blinding clarity. You either love or hate the man, probably the former.

Tesla’s friendship with Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), his main sponsor JP Morgan’s (Donnie Keshawarz) daughter, is a big part of the film. She is the voice of reason in his eccentric inventor’s life. In fact, she is the one who keeps up a running commentary of events in Tesla’s life, often breaking into pontifications about potential outcomes had events taken a slightly different turn. Her sharing pertinent information about how many results a Google search of ‘Nikola Tesla’ or ‘Thomas Edison’ would bring up, as she herself stares at a computer screen, is a refreshingly innovative cinematic device. Somehow, this completely asynchronous element helps situate a viewer in the film’s narrative thread.

The movie begins when Tesla is already in the US, working for Thomas Edison at Edison Machine Works. We are told that he dropped out of an engineering program in Budapest and that he had a close bond with his mother. But we don’t spend much time in his past. The scene where the inventors cross swords in the form of jamming ice cream cones on each other’s noses is every bit as hilarious as it was meant to be. Eve Hewson immediately reminding us that ‘this is almost certainly not how it happened’ almost makes the whole episode funnier.

The controversy over use of direct and alternating current has been beautifully captured. The film delves deep into the nature of Tesla’s work and is a great resource for someone who wants to know more about the inventor’s projects.

The film also does a remarkable job of depicting Tesla’s idiosyncrasies. He takes a tumble while roller-skating because ‘sometimes he has an extreme reaction to pearls’ – which Anne Morgan is wearing. He patiently wipes his tableware clean with snowy white table linen, which adds up to a sizeable pile on his table. The openly bizarre sequence where Tesla actually sings the Tears for Fears song ‘Everybody wants to rule the world’ into an old-fashioned microphone is pure genius.

But the film does lip service to Tesla’s famous meeting with Hindu sage Swami Vivekananda (Jameal Ali), using it as a means of explaining his decision to remain single all his life. We do get a glimpse of Tesla, the eccentric inventor, who has zero business sense. We also get a glimpse of Tesla, the human being, infatuated by dazzling actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who famously ‘travelled around the world in coffins’.

But, for some reason, the film stops short of Tesla’s days as a has-been inventor when he apparently moved from one hotel to the next without settling his bills. His fabled obsession with pigeons too, for some reason, has been left out.

Ethan Hawke, as Nikola Tesla, is, in one word, brilliant. From his moustache to his measured gait and intense eyes, he is a treat to watch.

The only complaint a viewer could have is a certain feeling of incompleteness. One wonders why, after doing such a good job of portraying Tesla’s life and times, the director would want to exercise his creative license by intentionally leaving out the chapter where the brilliant inventor considered a pigeon his ‘lover’.

Rating: 8/10

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