Tenet

 2020, d. Christopher Nolan - rental

I proclaim to love Christopher Nolan movies, and I do...I think they're pretty rad.  But at the same time, I don't rewatch Christopher Nolan movies.  I think the most I've seen any of his films is three times... The Dark Knight and Memento, I'm pretty sure.  I want to go back and watch them all, I just don't.  While I enjoy his films tremendously as both technical accomplishments and experiments in storytelling, emotionally they're a little hollow.

A dear friend of mine who passed away years ago used to argue this point, that Nolan's films lack human connection, and were soulless.  I used to argue back that how do you deny the spectacle of what Nolan is presenting, the sheer thrill of the action he accomplishes and the mastery of his lens.  He's a craftsman through and through.  But, Braz would argue back, that many a craftsman can put together a fine piece of furniture, or a tasty meal or a realistic painting, but they can also be devoid of heart and emotion.

I love these posters. They done
sell the story of the film at all
but they do sell its style

With Tenet, I see that now.  It stares you right in the face and delivers endless lines of dialogue that explain the conceit of "inversion" and "entropic devices" and advance the espionage tale along at a breakneck pace, but there's no warmth behind it, no sentimentality, no personal connection between the players or the audience.

Is there spectacle?  Of course... you're going to get spectacle after spectacle in a Nolan film.  And they're often awe-inspiring, but Tenet is so deep in the weeds in technical logistics, narrative complexities, and mental gymnastics it kind of forgets there needs to be characters at the center of it.

John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman) is absolutely a star.  Here as "protagonist", he is the point of view the entire film follows (save for the occasional diversion where Elizabeth Debicki is our necessary POV), and he just commands the screen.  His dad is Denzel, so he's certainly inherited the gift, but he has his own presence and he uses it well.  We don't get to know "protagonist" at all personally, but we learn about him as the movie progresses.  He's not James Bond, he's not suave and horny and pithy or violent and vengeful.  Instead he's dedicated to his mission, no nonsense, comfortable in any surrounding (even if he doesn't blend) but also has a moral ground where he doesn't want the innocent to get hurt.  Unfortunately by using Debicki's Kat to get at her estranged, weapons-dealing husband (Kenneth Branagh) he finds his mission somewhat compromised in putting her in harm's way.

Where a normal espionage film would really lean into a romantic entanglement between it's two leads, Nolan has no time for love, Dr. Jones. There's to much pseudo-science babble to get through.  Instead Washington and Debicki sort of form a respectful alliance (not even really a friendship, but one gets the sense that "protagonist" doesn't really do friendship, at least in the traditional sense) where he looks out for her and she's willing to help him save the world.

That dynamic is the easier part of the equation of Tenet to understand, even if it's abnormal for this kind of story.  The complexities lie in, well, everything else.  Early on in the film Nolan introduces his conceit of "inversion" through some comic book science technobabble.  And less cries of "show don't tell" ring out, he shows you while he's telling you what this all means, and it's still a lot to make sense of.  Things can be "inverted" so that they effectively operate backwards.  Guns catch bullets, a shattered glass puts itself back together.  But there has to be intent to use these inverted objects.  It's a difficult conceit to wrap your brain around generally.  But they're just pieces of a larger puzzle, about a cold war with the future, and a maguffin about a physical algorithm that could end the world.

Once the reverse-entropy is introduced, the film takes on a life of its own which either will engage those with more puzzle oriented minds or put off anyone who shuts down when timey-wimey mental gymnastics come into play.  It helped me knowing in advance that at some point the film would hit a point where it was going to "invert" itself, so I was already looking out for those ideas at play.

Even still knowing what Nolan was *trying* to do, and then attempting to follow along with him and his story proved difficult.  Nolan's always been fascinated with non-linear storytelling as well as temporal physics, and this is past the line of toying with those conceits and getting an audience to engage with it.  I can just see that the WB studio heads were saying to themselves, I don't get it, but Nolan has been money in the bank every other time, so let's see how it plays out. And it's true, in the past his films, though monkeying with time or perception of time or narrative order, have all been huge successes.  But this pushed it too far, and he will no doubt be reigned in next time if he doesn't do so on his own.

Attempting to follow along with say the highway chase (both times) or the end battle (shot and orchestrated far better than nearly every "end battle" in recent memory) proves so difficult because, as the film keeps reminding the audience, you've got to stop thinking so linearly.  But we're built to think linear, to live in our present, to see the future as ahead of use and our past as behind us.  Toy with that, to try to understand that the opposite could be true is a brain breaker, and Tenet lives in that reality, where people can move backwards and forwards through time, and so what we see on screen is often things moving both forward and backwards at the same time.

But even in lack of understanding, Tenet is a huge movie, and Nolan, reteaming with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Interstellar) delivers another undeniably gorgeous film.  Even in its quieter moments its still just a marvel to watch.  Ludwig Gorannson (The Mandalorian) delivers a score that is as essential to the film as any performance or special effect.  It's pulsating with energy and tension, yet rarely calling attention to itself.  Nolan loves to heighten ambient noises in his movies and they blend with the score to create its own reality...not to mention Gorannson's also playing with music moving backwards through time as well.

Washington, as noted, is already proving to be a reliable performer in any situation, and to bring any life to such a void of a character is largely on him.  Robert Pattinson is easily forgotten because he's so giving.  For such a big name, Pattinson is so very comfortable in supporting roles, and literally supporting the lead. He's appealing but he's never taking away from what others are doing to shine himself up.  Elizabeth Debicki is one of my favourite working actresses.  I love how vulnerable she allows herself to be, while also conveying an intense amount of strength.  Likewise I appreciate how she can slap on three inch heels even further accentuating her stature and Nolan let her loom over Washington and Branagh.  Branagh, for his part, makes a meal out of his role.  Everyone else is so restrained letting Branagh just masticate every line in his broad Russian accent.  He's a beastly cartoon of a bad guy, and it just makes it so apparent that Nolan's truest wish is to just make a Bond movie, but only on his own terms.

I understand completely the chilly reception to this movie.  I don't love it myself, and yet, I liked it quite a bit.  I giggled a lot as I could see Nolan's monkeyshines at work, even if I didn't always comprehend what I was seeing (which was often).  It's going to take a few viewings to really "get" inversion, both how it plays out in the visual telling of this film, but also what it means for the overall setup of the story.  It does feel like an introduction, as if Nolan has at least one more of these in mind, if not a whole trilogy, but at the same time I think he'll be okay if it doesn't come to fruition due to lack of interest (or understanding). 

[Toasty-post on Tenet: we agree fully!]