Michael Almereyda
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Connections, in both directions
For instance, when he reminds her how much they enjoyed the Julia Roberts movie My Best Friend's Wedding, providing a droll recap of the plot.
In the film’s wittiest passage, played with bone-dry irony by Hamm, Walter Prime recounts a past date to see “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (“It was Julia Roberts… for a while, it was always Julia Roberts”), only for Marjorie to customize it into a more romantically old-school evening at “Casablanca.”
It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda's criminally-underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire.
He earned a brief appearance in Tomorrowland and a longer one in The Prestige , both notable for their conflation of science and magic.
Hawke is more than up to the task here, and he strikes a comfortable middle ground between the popular perception of Tesla as alienated outcast and David Bowie’s portrayal of the genius in The Prestige, a purveyor of wonders so bizarre that they might as well be magic.
I remember distinctly in The Prestige, played by none other than David Bowie, and recently in The Current War, played by Nicholas Hoult.
The movies have done their part to exploit his considerable mystique without necessarily drawing him in from the sidelines: David Bowie played him as the drollest of enigmas in “The Prestige” (2006), and Nicholas Hoult gave us a peek at Tesla the wily young upstart in the more recent “The Current War.”
In “The Prestige,” the charismatic David Bowie did for the inventor of AC current and most of what made radio possible what he did for Andy Warhol in “Basquiat” — made him other-worldly and cool.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
influenced Tesla (2020)
Visuals
As filmed by Sean Price Williams, Alex Ross Perry’s longtime cinematographer, his aesthetic surroundings are often reminiscent of Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , though significantly smaller in scope — I’ve always admired Dominik’s attempt to capture the world through the imperfect and slightly warped craft of an old window, and there are often moments in Tesla where that approach feels echoed, such as a scene in which Hawke struggles with his brother’s memory while penning a letter by firelight.
Despite Jim and Nora's spontaneous eruptions of good cheer akin to Dashiell Hammett's detective duo in The Thin Man, Almereyda subtly intertwines an undercurrent of creepy ghost story devices.
Again, this will be a hit or miss aesthetic, perhaps in a similar vein as Lars von Trier ’s Dogville, a film where buildings are fully replaced with chalk marks.
The artifice isn’t in bad faith, however – fictional scenes are flagged up (“This meeting never happened,” says Morgan); the use of backdrop paintings and sparse sets evoke the archly stylised storytelling of Lars von Trier’s Dogville .
Actually it's a little closer to a couple of other downtown auteurs' vampire films, Abel Ferrera's "The Addiction" and, especially, Michael Almereyda's "Nadja," with all their thirsty hipsters looking for a fix.
Tesla is a period piece that daringly mixes genre trappings with punk rock sensibilities, making it the most refreshing film of its kind since Sofia Coppola’s equally divisive Marie Antoinette.
The premise serves as a malleable metaphor for just about any racial anxiety you please: the white coopting of black cool, cited as one of the reasons for the Armitages’ selection of exclusively black targets; the ongoing use of unwilling black bodies to perform white labor from plantation to penitentiary; and the pressures of conformity borne by the blacks living among white affluence—it’s explained that the black “vessels” don’t wholly lose consciousness once occupied by their new white hosts, and are condemned to an existence acting as mute observers of their servility, a situation dramatized in a scene with housekeeper Betty Gabriel (also a standout in the ensemble of Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter ), who begins uncontrollably leaking tears while keeping up the front of a pristine smile, the despondency of a prisoner begging to be put of their misery clearly visible behind her wet eyes.
"You're going to Ireland to dry out?" asks their bemused but incredulous doctor ( The Exorcist 's late Jason Miller, in a wry cameo.)
One gloriously demented scene featuring Tesla’s transmitter plays like a cross between Robert Egger’s “The Lighthouse” climax and James Whales’ “Frankenstein.”