Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon duel over electricity in a long-delayed Current War
Film Reviews Movie Review
Is it too soon to call The Current War a throwback to 2015? That was the year middling or worse biopics The Imitation Game and The Theory Of Everything received multiple Oscar nominations, and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s YA adaptation Me And Earl And The Dying Girl became the toast of Sundance (though not of anywhere else). The Current War is Gomez-Rejon’s follow-up, and it feels at first like a biopic supergroup: Imitation Game’s Benedict Cumberbatch IS prickly genius Thomas Edison, intent on bringing electricity to late 19th-century Manhattan! Michael Shannon IS rich soft-spoken industrialist George Westinghouse, battling Edison for the dominant mode of electrical current to light up these United States! And, on the biographical undercard, Nicholas Hoult IS Nikola Tesla, flitting back and forth between the two men and never quite getting the success or respect he deserves.
Although The Current War is not an unearthed relic from the innocent days of four years ago, that’s not so far off. The movie originally premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, ahead of a planned awards-season release from the Weinstein Company. A few weeks and one New York Times bombshell later, the company was all but gone, and the movie’s release date sat in the wreckage. It’s finally opening in North America with an advertised Director’s Cut subtitle, and without the involvement of indicted producer Harvey Weinstein. Somewhat confusingly, given Weinstein’s reputation as an editing-room meddler always pushing for a truncated version, this cut runs 10 minutes shorter, though it does include additional newly shot scenes.
At the very least, the relatively compact running time prevents The Current War from bogging down in tedious origin stories. The movie opens with Edison already famous, preparing for a demonstration of his direct current (DC) electrical system in lower Manhattan. While making the rounds to drum up interest and financing, he wearily decides to snub a dinner with Westinghouse and his wife, Marguerite (Katherine Waterston), which in the movie’s telling raises the ire of an otherwise mild-mannered fellow. Westinghouse pursues an alternating current (AC) system, cheaper and more adept across great distances—claiming, in a passive-aggressive businessman sort of way, a simple interest in improving efficiency.
Edison, meanwhile, sacrifices some of his principles in order to smear Westinghouse’s AC electricity as potentially deadly. Back and forth they go, racing toward the opportunity to light up the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and accidentally getting involved in the evolution of the death penalty along the way. The movie takes place over about 13 years, and struggles to depict the passage of time organically, or sometimes at all. Even the standard biopic familial neglect feels itself neglected. One strange compression has a supporting character receive a scary medical diagnosis and then die tragically within what seems like 24 hours.
The movie feels tonally compressed, too, squeezed together from a variety of odd sources. The obsessive one-upmanship brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a more flagrantly fictional story that also folded the exploits of Tesla into its narrative. Edison’s snarky ripostes (his job self-description: “I fix problems for idiots”) recall not just past Cumberbatch roles but Aaron Sorkin’s play The Farnsworth Invention, which also addressed an innovator’s clashes with an enormous corporation. But Nolan and Sorkin have distinctive and immediately recognizable directing and writing styles. Gomez-Rejon, for his part, appears to be seeking recognition based on sheer volume. The Current War may be the most unproductively stylized movie of 2019 and 2017. Me And Earl had plenty of flourishes, but they more or less fit the referential, show-offy, youthful energy of the material. Here, the camerawork of cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon (who also shot Earl, in addition to most of Park Chan-wook’s work) is even more ostentatious, whether it’s doing an unbroken lap around a train car, capturing elaborate overhead shots, or employing fish-eye lens for a simple back-and-forth dialogue scene.
The Current War employs actors capable of their own eccentric stylizations, and gives them very little leeway to make the material their own. Gomez-Rejon keeps snatching it back with every offbeat composition idea he can muster. These shots generate some moment-to-moment sensation—unlike so many of its biopic predecessors, this is not a boring movie to look at—but turn the characters into posable historical action figures. Cumberbatch and Shannon are still charismatic performers, and it’s especially enjoyable to see the latter go quiet, even gentle, in a part that could have been brimmed over with affectation. Gomez-Rejon evinces a generous view of his multiple subjects and avoids the simplicity of a hero-villain clash. But given how much interesting material he generates from the death penalty associations alone, The Current War ultimately feels like it may be going too easy on both parties. The movie wants very much to look at the past as a window to the future, but not as much as it wants to look at everything from endlessly, fussily canted angles.
55 Comments
I ask as a fan of history, and given that the “involvement in the death penalty” discussion in part was created by the act:Do they fry the elephant?
Just watch The Topsy episode of Bob’s Burgers it’s shorter.
“They’ll sing, ‘Ah, Topsy’ at my au-topsy!”
Or read “The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander.Seriously. Read it.
No elephants are fried.No…. ELEPHANTS are fried.
Works on contingency?
Oh they got this all wrongAnimal Welfare?
No, elephants fried!
Fry an elephant? No problem!Er, I mean, No! Problem….
Contingency Fee?No, Money Down!And that Bar Association logo shouldn’t be there either.
“They’ll say ‘Aww, Topsy’ at my autopsyBut no one will be, more shocked than me”
Actually Topsy’s death took place a decade after the War of Currents ended.
That was my first thought too. I mean, it’s horrible, but it’s interesting. It says a lot about Edison’s character too. It’s a neat little character development shortcut.
this seems like a story that is A. kind of dull in its particulars (two already very rich guys fight over who will become even richer with old and relatively simple tech by todays standards) and B. this is like a zombie film- tesla and edison and all this peaked 5 or so years ago. people funded that tesla museum (or didn’t, but who cares, nobody reads the oatmeal anymore), he got all his podcast mentions, the ‘5 reasons edison was actually a huge dick’ got its cracked write up that i read while pooping and its no longer interesting to be like ‘guys- tesla got screwed, edison might be a dick and westinghouse isn’t just a chinese brand that sells cheap TVs on amazon!’
heck, we even had the requisite ‘maybe tesla was actually crazy and himself a dick’ backlash to all the fawning initial stories.
There’s no question that Tesla was mentally ill in later life — he lived on until 1943, but had become basically Howard Hughes before Howard Hughes, being a recluse who rarely left his hotel room in the last three decades of his life.
yeah, he just sent out letters to various rich people trying to get them to fund his increasingly implausible invention ideas. but even as a young man, he was noted for his temperament as much as he was for his mechanical genius. i can’t imagine there was ever a time when people were like ‘oh boy, here comes nick tesla, friend to children and widows!’
the other thing with this movie premise is that nobody won or lost the current wars, really. AC power won the lions share of the commercial stuff, but DC was (and still is) used in all sorts of industrial and long range applications. so its basically a war in which both sides won.
I think the important point is that Edison’s process is much more how science actually works than Tesla’s.
The story of Thomas Edison dream to prove that Direct Current was better than Alternating Current no matter how many animals he needed to kill.Eventually Tesla and Edisons feud escalated…
Hmm… can’t they do more reshoots to make it look like this, please?
What in the hell is this and where can I read more of it?!
It’s called Atomic Robo, sort of like Hellboy but more science fiction than fantasy.
Thank you!
They’re really tapping into Cumberbatch’s natural talents by having him portray a renowned dickweed.
Eh, by all accounts he’s a lovely person in real life. He came to a small Australian Comic con a few years back and everyone I spoke to about him said he was friendly and incredibly flattered by his fans. He’s definitely skilled at playing dicks, but the real guy seems nothing like that.
Yeah, if anything it’s his Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman whois notorious for being a self-styled curmudgeon, despite generally playing self-effacing and affable in his roles
Some of the most famous on-screen dicks were actually really nice people in real life. Carrol O’Connor of course being the most high-profile example.
Why would you say something like that when you do6nt know the person? Being snarky for snarkiness’ sake isn’t amusing if funny us what you were going for.
But Cumberbatch is utterly superb at playing dickweeds.I mean, he seems like a really nice guy in interviews and stuff, but if you’ve got a movie and need someone to play a dickweed, better call Benedict.
This movie will make no box office juice (strained pun but still). The trailer plays like a parody with the jokes removed.
That’s disappointing. I didn’t even know this movie existed before I saw the trailers on TV recently, and the actors involved gave me some hope, even if the trailers didn’t. The events of that time were truly monumental, even if most people aren’t particularly interested in the difference between AC and DC, and the main players even moreso. Shit got bonkers. These personalities and their intellects were enormous and their foibles mind boggling. Endless displays of animals getting shocked to death, including an elephant, and failed attempts at human execution. It surprises me that there hasn’t been more films that explore the actual events of that period. Tesla and Edison are endlessly fascinating people, making extraordinarily morally questionable decisions (mostly Edison), that literally changed all human existence, yet nobody has made a good movie about either of them, let alone Westinghouse.
Yes, I mean how could a recent historical moment where the future was decided and regulated and the idea of can we over should we ran rampant in the pursuit of profits possibly be relevant or of interest?Especially when it happened in our own (US America’s) back yard?
Don’t let this review disappoint you into not checking it out. I just saw this and I loved it for the most part. Unlike the reviewer, I found the visuals thrilling and completely organic, even moving at times. The review is just one opinion.
The book “Last Days of Night” is a really fascinating exploration of this time period and the BAJILLION lawsuits that Edison and Westinghouse had flying back and forth. Every description of this film makes me wonder if the creators were influenced by that book, but it sounds like that was going to be a separate movie. The last reports about it came in 2017-2018, so I’m guessing it didn’t get off the ground.
Meanwhile, back in 2013…
Let’s see them top David Bowie’s entrance in “The Prestige.”
Bob’s Burgers managed to cover all this in a tight 22, so I don’t know what this film’s excuse is.
“Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a more flagrantly fictional story that also folded the exploits of Tesla into its narrative”It was Christopher Priest’s The Prestige long before Nolan dumbed it down.
HEY PAL… YOU GET A LOAD OF THE NERD????
Pay no attention to Hassenger trying to prove he’s a nasty fool.
It seems early November is shaping up to be the where the worst movies of the year, that movie distributors are trying to sell as “interesting dramas with BIG stars”, go into the wild to die a horrible low earning death.
Well, after Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody both won four Oscars last year and releasing int the same time frame, even middling movies can get that sweet sweet awards love.
I was only commenting on what they are shoveling at us in this very near, smelly, rancid November 8th ish. Not observing November as Month of the Bomb historically.
The Oscars were so weird last year, like how is Green Book winning awards and Widows doesn’t even get a dang nomination?
i might just have to stomach eggsbenedict cabbagepatch just for another tesla movie.
im intrigued by hoult playing tesla; and i love michael shannon.
As an electrical engineer who always has to build rectifiers into my controls I would have much rather had DC be the transfer method even if it wouldn’t really work.
This seems like something Drunk History would have taken care of in a much more entertaining way, in a much shorter time span.
I saw a test screening of this so long ago that I just assumed it had come out a few years back and I never noticed. Weird to see it popping back up.
Didn’t this start life as a Hamilton knock-off?
What’s the elaborate old timey facial hair situation here?
Moderate. The old-timey top-hat situation, though, is exceptional.
So it seems your main issue was annoyed at the visual style? Meh, that seems more like personal taste. Though if this is the same director who did American Horror Story episodes, I can see getting irked: I was sometimes annoyed with the visual presentation of that show. Actually, if a movie or TV show’s story lacks in any way, I can usually be cheered up by a showy style. Not that I had much interest in seeing this movie I’d only heard about a few days ago. But that it languished for two years because its main producer was a terrible creep and criminal is unfair to the movie.
I love movies that give me something interesting visually—I’m not much of an advocate for austerity in film style—but I do think this goes beyond the realm of personal taste (I mean, to the extent that any of this can go beyond the realm of personal taste) and into the visual presentation making the movie feel more muddled and dramatically inert than it might otherwise. The unusual angles and set-ups come so quickly, it’s hard for them to generate much mood or meaning. Though some of them are certainly neat to look at in the moment.
I think I woke up today feeling contentious about criticism, which I’ve read as long as forever. I get your point, but I wonder if the average viewer or the filmmakers making the thing for the general public, will connect the visual presentation to any lack of meaning and mood, if an audience feel those things are lacking. In other words—and here comes a dreaded cliche example of critiquing the critics—maybe your more expert knowledge of film craft is making you read into things that shouldn’t be read into or weren’t thought of as the effect/point. Or maybe not! My thing with critics is that, sure, they have personal tastes, but if they just had that, without some objective grounding in the evidence of the text and why the choices were made, anybody’s opinion, critic or rando guy on the street would be just as valid as anybody else’s and criticism wouldn’t be useful. I’m not saying you’re doing that, as I’m sure that’s the first lesson of the first day of criticism school. Again, I think I just wanted to argue.
There’s another angle to being a critic: You provide interesting context, insight, or observations, so that the viewer might better appreciate what they’re seeing. That’s in play here.
I fully agree with that. Glad you said so “that the viewer might better appreciate what they’re seeing.” To me, that’s a critic’s main job. The “context, insight, [and] observations” have to directly come from the text. I wasn’t accusing Jesse of doing this, but I do have a pet peeve when a critic subjectively reviews something on the basis of what they’d like to see instead of what’s in front of them. Or, focusing on a piece of the movie that isn’t considered important by the filmmakers and considering it lacking or affecting other parts of the movie, and missing the point or not being moved when most others are, which means the director made the film to elicit that response, and not a response that was a nitpick or something else.