Christopher Nolan’s Tenet: Clever film, cold as ice
A confusing narrative and a lack of emotion make Christopher Nolan’s time warp extravaganza an underwhelming experience.
Tenet (M)
★★★½
Wide national release (except Victoria)
As anyone with the most passing interest in cinema must know by now Tenet, the latest time warp extravaganza from writer-director Christopher Nolan, is a $US250m gamble on the very future of the medium, or, at least, the medium as we’ve known it until now. Will the new film from the creator of Memento, Inception, Interstellar, three superior Batman movies and Dunkirk lure a nervous populace away from their streaming devices and into cinemas? Since the film only officially opened on Thursday, and has yet to be seen in the US, the question is open; but at the public advance screening I attended at my local cinema last Sunday morning there were only four people in the audience and one of them was me.
Tenet may well attract repeat audiences since, like Inception, the plot, such as it is, is bewilderingly convoluted and invites fans to return again (and again) to sort it all out. A film critic friend of mine based in London saw it twice before filing her review and even then admitted she didn’t entirely get what it was all about.
The plot, in a nutshell, is derived from the James Bond formula of the globetrotting super-secret agent setting out to bring down a larger-than-life villain and save the world. In this case the unnamed hero (referred to in the cast list at the end as The Protagonist) is a former CIA agent who joins the palindromic Tenet organisation with a mission to prevent a catastrophe that will be worse than Armageddon. The bad guy is Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a thoroughly evil and powerful Russian oligarch. The girl is the bad guy’s elegant, statuesque wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki). The hero’s sidekick is a charming Brit named Neil, played with an engagingly self-mocking approach by Robert Pattinson.
Sator is using the technique of “inversion”, something that enables people and things to go back in time. This raises the old question of what would happen if a man travelled back in time and killed his grandfather. Would the killer cease to exist? Tenet makes much of this idea, so that in several scenes the action plays in reverse. This is most effective in showdown where The Protagonist can already see the bullet holes from a gun that has yet to be fired.
Nolan is second-to-none when it comes to elaborately staged action scenes. The film begins with a terrific sequence which is set in the National Opera House in Kiev. The audience is in place and the orchestra is tuning up when the elegant setting is raided by a gang of terrorists using gas and guns. It’s a splendid curtain-raiser that, as the film progresses, proves hard to beat. Other action showstoppers include a frantic chase along a highway in Tallinn, Estonia, where – in keeping with the inversion theme – one of the vehicles is driving backwards and a scene at Oslo airport where a huge jetliner taxis slowly into the terminal building.
The great Hollywood director Samuel Fuller, when asked the meaning of “film”, famously said that “Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: Emotion.” I tend to agree that a film, or indeed any work of art, that lacks emotion is stillborn. Nolan has proved in the past, especially with Memento and Interstellar, that he is more than capable of connecting emotionally with his audience. But there’s not much emotion to be found in Tenet. It’s a clever film, sometimes a brilliantly clever film, but it’s as cold as ice. That’s partly due to the leading actor. Washington, son of Denzel, was electrifying in Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman. Here, to continue the James Bond analogy, he’s more George Lazenby than Sean Connery, and as a result some crucial scenes with Debicki – who is as mesmerising as always – go for little.
You also get the impression that Nolan’s delight in playing around with time doesn’t work as well on this occasion. It seems more contrived than it did in Inception, less necessary. Full comprehension of a pretty confusing narrative is further challenged by the sometimes inaudible dialogue.
But if you forget the intricacies of the plot – something Nolan’s legion of fans certainly won’t be prepared to do – there’s still a lot of fun to be had from Tenet. Branagh’s Russian accent is one endearing element; Pattinson’s relaxed sidekick is another; and there’s a delicious one-scene cameo from Michael Caine, seen dining in a posh London club, that looks as though it has strayed in from another movie altogether. There are a dizzying variety of locations: Ukraine, India, Italy (both the Amalfi coast and Trieste), London, Oslo, Tallinn. It’s enough to make you wish you could board an international flight again.
Tenet is handsomely photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema and the relentless, pounding music score by Ludwig Goransson successfully adds to the notion of nerves being stretched to breaking point. Maybe it will take repeated viewings to fully appreciate Nolan’s achievement here; certainly he deserves praise for his attempts to reinvent a pretty tired genre. But I think I’ll go back and look at Interstellar again – that was a movie with heart.
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