Visionaries, both the filmmaker and his subject, grace Michael Almereyda's TESLA

 

If you're already a fan, as I am, of filmmaker Michael Almereyda (Hamlet, Happy Here and Now, Marjorie Prime), wild horses couldn't keep you from viewing his latest movie, TESLA, about (no, not the embarrassing car company) old Nikola himself. And if the movie is not Almereyda's best (that defaults to Experimenter, his film about Stanley Milgram), it's certainly up there with his better work. The writer/ director again uses Ethan Hawke as his star (as he earlier did in Hamlet), and the actor comes through with another under-stated (and likely to be under-rated) but utterly specific and believable performance in the role of this visionary inventor.

Almereyda (shown at right) again, as in Experimenter, draws from a multitude of sources, historical to present-day. He even has his narrator, Anne Morgan (John. Pierpont's daughter) offer comparisons between the amount of current Google searches devoted to Tesla, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison (the latter two also appear as characters in the film). 

Tesla also traces the race for supremacy of either direct or alternating electrical current, while combining history, philosophy, fantasy and even maybe a little wish-fulfillment (Mr. Hawke's lovely rendition, late in the movie and shown in the photo at bottom of this post, of that great song, Everybody Wants to Rule the World) to create a very personal look at this oddball-by-almost-any-standard character. 

And Mr. Hawke (shown on poster, top, and above) beautifully captures the mystery, hesitancy and complexity of this man to an absolute T.  Almereyda does a nice job with period detail, even if much of these are to be found via some very obvious photograph-inserted backdrops (the budget here may be big for an Almereyda project, for not, shall we say, for most studio productions).

Still, the costuming is lovely and on-target (that's Eve Hewson as Anne Morgan, above, right), and the rest of the technical aspects are generally first-rate, as well. And Almereyda's subjective mix of personal, philosophical and occasionally obliquely political is always welcome. (That's Jim Gaffigan, below, right, playing George Westinghouse.)

Interestingly enough, what holds the movie back from achieving full impact is simply that much of what the filmmaker covers here has already been done -- and better -- in a movie from three years ago entitled The Current War (or as we saw it on Blu-ray, The Current War: Director's Cut), which proved to be one of the best films of the past several years. The earlier film portions its time and content toward Edison and Westinghouse, with Tesla in a more supporting role. But the battle between alternating and direct current is made just as momentous and vital. Thanks mostly to the behavior of Harvey Weinstein, this better film nearly disappeared completely from view, but I suggest you seek it out. And then watch Tesla as a kind of complementary and unusual "take" on it all.

From IFC Films and running 102 minutes (The Current War: Director's Cut runs exactly the same length, to the minute!), Tesla opens in select theaters and via digital and cable VOD this coming Friday, August 21. 

Time, memory, mortality, character converge in Michael Almereyda's MARJORIE PRIME

It's the future, right, so this must be sci-fi? Yes, but writer/director Michael Almereyda has more on his mind than space ships, aliens, replicants or time travel. His latest film (his last one, the personal-history/documentary, Escapes,  just opened a few weeks back), MARJORIE PRIME, is more concerned with the way we use the latest technology we're given, and then -- as in Spike Jonze's wonderful Her, and the British TV Black Mirror segment, Be Right Back -- goes just a few steps beyond where we currently find ourselves and into quite a new world. This world looks a lot like our own, yet allows us to do so much more -- the end results of which are both helpful and maybe not so. With new technology comes new challenge.

In my last review of Mr. Almeyerda's work, I noted how empathetic this director, pictured at right, so often is. Here, that empathy extends to the "Prime" of the title (there are, it turns out, a number of these). A "Prime" is a kind of holographic creation of a recently deceased person, whom those left behind -- wife, husband, daughter, whoever -- can use to assuage the grief, guilt and any of those many feelings/problems that remain unresolved once a loved one has died. The first Prime we meet in the film is Walter, Marjorie's late husband, embodied here by actor Jon Hamm (shown at left, above and below), as a younger version of the man. Marjorie herself (played by Lois Smith, shown at right, above and below) is now aged and suffering from off-and-on dementia.

The film's other leading characters are Marjorie's adult daughter (Geena Davis, below) and her husband (Tim Robbins, further below), who clearly have mixed feelings about this use of a Prime, even if, as it does indeed appear, this is helpful to mom.

Almereyda, who both wrote and directed, gives us movies that are always intellectual feats. This one is just such a film -- and even more so than usual, I would say. It is supremely elegant and quiet, full of discussion about the uses and mis-uses of memory, along with how it works. Characters' memories allow us to see flashbacks of certain important moments, as well as to better understand the ongoing relationship between these four people, one of whom, Walter, exists almost only as a Prime.

Along the way, two other characters also become Prime, which makes for some surprise and further investigation (of mortality and grief, among other things). In Jonze's Her, the "machine" develops feelings, personality and much else that we might call human. Almereyda's Primes seem to do so, as well, but on a much less obvious scale and manner.

While the filmmaker and his creations are subtle and never push for our sympathy, they do empathize with our human feelings and failings -- and very well, too. Yet the film itself is rigorously unsentimental.

The performances are striking, intensely specific and deeply felt. The ensemble works beautifully together, keeping us ever on our toes as we watch and listen intently, calibrating who these people are -- both humans and their Primes -- and how much the latter are becoming, or at least mimicking quite beautifully, the former. All the actors are terrific, but Mr. Robbins, ever under-rated, is as good here as I have seen him.

The movie's final scene is one of great beauty, sadness, and surprise. You will wonder at it in both amazement and acceptance. Almereyda, like Jonze, seems non-judgmental (hence, perhaps, his great empathy), and unlike Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker, he does no finger-wagging. In any case, he has come up with one of the most unusual films of the year -- a must-see, I think, for thinking audiences.

From FilmRise and running 97 minutes, Marjorie Prime opens this Friday, August 18, in New York City at the Quad Cinema, in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Playhouse 7  and Monica Film Center, in San Francisco at The Roxie, in San Rafael at the Smith Rafael Film Center, and in Arlington, MA, at the Regent Theater.  The following Friday, it will open in another ten venues. Click here (then scroll down) to view all currently scheduled playdates, theaters, and cities.

Michael Almereyda probes Hampton Fancher (and Hollywood) in new doc bio-pic, ESCAPES

If TrustMovies had to pick a single quality that describes what filmmaker Michael Almereyda consistently achieves more than any other in his films, I would call it empathy for the subject at hand. Almereyda's style is often so strange (and equally wonderful, however) -- have you seen his Happy Here and Now? -- that the empathy comes across as something other than the more usual 'sympathy' that pushes us to shed a tear for our poor protagonist. Yet that empathy stands tall amidst other conflicting feelings: surprise, wonder, confusion, even occasional queasiness.

In his second-latest film, ESCAPES (another new one, Marjorie Prime, opens soon), Almereyda, shown at left, takes a good, long, loving look at a fellow possessing the very classy name of Hampton Fancher that many of us have heard of yet probably know little about. The filmmaker begins by showing us, as we hear Fancher's gravelly-yet-mellifluous voice (which narrates the entire documentary), our young man (shown below) as the typically hot-looking-yet-impoverished Hollywood actor, struggling to make ends meet, even as he refuses to be taken care of by his current and more successful actress girlfriend. That girlfriend is owed some money by her ex-boyfriend, and Fancher is keen on her getting the debt paid back. That story turns out to be just one of many succulent tales that Fancher regales us with over the course of this consistently interesting, surprising and enriching 89-minute movie -- which bounces along merrily, due to both Fancher's abilities as a raconteur and Almereyda's very interesting use of accompanying visuals.

What the filmmaker has cleverly done here is to splice together one after another of Mr. Fancher's many appearances on screen and TV (50 of them are seen here by my count) to form a kind of constant backdrop for the actor/writer's storytelling. Other actors -- from Troy Donahue (below, left) to Raymond Burr -- appear with Fancher in scenes from his various films and television series.

The key to why these scenes were specifically chosen appears to be their mood and the intention of the characters on screen, reflecting whatever situation Fancher is currently describing. They're clearly not that situation, but the manner in which they reflect it is by turns amusing, surprising, graphic and/or silly. It's all great fun, in addition to being an original and appropriate way to couple visuals to verbal storytelling.

Among the many anecdotes, the best may be Fancher's tale of arriving in Harrisburg, PA, for a special screening of an earlier (and evidently pretty awful) movie he'd made, and then coupling for a day (and a night) with the plain-Jane secretary of the person in charge of his appearance there. This is a humdinger and then some, and it just keeps getting better as it goes along. Divided into chapters with interesting heading, the movie spends one of these giving us a fascinating take on Fancher's own early history, growing up (at right) at as part of a half-Hispanic family in Southern California and then ending up, for a time, as an evidently pretty good Flamenco dancer (below), before setting his sites on a career as an actor, and then a writer, in Hollywood.

His career as the former did not take off, past a slew of minor and then supporting roles, and he admits in the course of the film that he never really wanted to act and was, in fact, a lazy actor, who never bothered doing his homework regarding character. It was as a writer (as well as executive producer of but a single film) that he is likely to be best remembered. That film was Blade Runner, which, as an actor, Fancher had tried to option from its author Philip K. Dick early on, and was finally able to do with the help of his good friend and (by then paralyzed) actor Brian Kelly, who had starred in the popular TV series, Flipper. The section devoted to Kelly sheds a good deal of new light on Fancher, the friendship between the two men, their careers and competitiveness, and Fancher's psychological profile.

The man's relationship with several women important in his life comes to the fore, as well, especially that of his connection to and love for actress Barbara Hershey. Of course, it is via Fancher himself that we are hearing all this, but I have to admit that the guy seems like a relatively reliable witness and somebody I might have been happy to know and be lucky enough to call my friend. (That's the more-or-less current Mr. Fancher -- still a good-looking guy, even as he approaches his 80th year -- shown above and below.

From Grasshopper Film, Escapes opens tomorrow, Wednesday, July 26, in New York City at the IFC Center, and from there moves to another 14 cities around the country over the weeks to come. It will play Washington DC at the Landmark E Street Cinema beginning August 4, and in Los Angeles at the Landmark NuArt, starting August 11. To see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters, simply click here then scroll down to the bottom of your screen and click on Where to Watch.

Catching up with one of 2015's best films: Michael Almereyda's knockout EXPERIMENTER

TrustMovies has long had a soft spot for the films of Michael Almereyda, They're odd, certainly, but they've usually hit this viewer in ways that most other movies don't. His latest, EXPERIMENTER -- all about the life, career and experiments of behavioral scientist Stanley Milgram -- is, I wager, his best yet: the most accessible yet different of his entire oeuvre. The experience of viewing it is like sitting in on perhaps the best, most wonderful, rich and expansive high school or college class that you've ever taken: one that combines science, philosophy, behavior, ethics, and a whole lot more. Ever better, this writer/director (shown below) has expanded his own kit of moviemaking tools and tricks to include an array he's never offered up until now.

The result is a film that grabs us from the outset and hold us fast, as we meet Milgram (the always excellent Peter Sarsgaard. shown above, left, and below, right), his soon-to-be wife (the better-than-ever Winona Ryder, above, right, and below, left), and a host of subsidiary characters playing the helpers and participants in Milgram's notable experiments -- the most famous of which (from the 1960s) would be that little ditty in which folk were given instructions to shock their "partner" with increasing doses of electricity whenever a wrong answer was given until they were using enough "power" to render the recipient dead. A wide majority of these fine Americans (and later folk from other countries) willingly obliged -- making clear that the behavior of the Nazis during WWII (doing what they were told, no mater the consequence to other people) was maybe not so far afield from "normal" human behavior, depending on the circumstances. The results of his experiment did not make Milgram particularly popular among his peers (who earlier claimed nothing like this could ever happen) nor among the common folk who preferred to see themselves as, by nature, generally good and kind. More than anything else, I think, Milgram managed to puncture our deep-set capacity for hypocrisy and denial.

How Almereyda brings all this to fruition -- breaking the fourth wall, using an elephant out of nowhere and quite brilliantly, creating the 1960 and 70s with spot-on decor and often completely fake "theatrical" backgrounds, in the process making us understand and accept so much more than most movies even attempt -- educates us and entertain us in equal measure, giving insight into the life and mind of this quite special scientist and man.

In the fine and precisely-chosen supporting cast, a particular standout is Jim Gaffigan, above, playing one of the Milgram's most enjoyable "actor/helpers" in the experiment. From Magnolia Pictures, the movie got a limited theatrical release and some VOD play last year. It's now out on Blu-ray (the transfer looks spiffy indeed!), DVD and digital download. Do not miss it. (Having just watched it the other evening, I am adding it right now to my post on the Best and Most Underseen Movies of 2015. In fact, if TM had a list of "top ten" films, rather than "top 50," Experimenter would probably rest in that tier, too)