Christopher Nolan (2020)
Not for the first time with Christopher Nolan, I failed to stay the course (see The Dark Knight Rises) and found an extravaganza in which time is of the essence making a temporal impression Nolan didn’t intend (see Interstellar). As a token precaution against incomprehension, I checked the premise of Tenet before setting out for the cinema: according to Wikipedia, ‘The plot follows a secret agent who must manipulate time in order to prevent World War III’. Once I started struggling to understand what was going on (very soon), I kept reassuring myself that John David Washington’s character was manipulating time in order to prevent World War III. This mantra paid diminishing returns, especially since it didn’t explain what anyone else on the screen was doing.
Washington’s protagonist, a CIA agent, is called the Protagonist – a mark of the film’s Importance, not to say Originality. Christopher Nolan’s intellectual reputation is by now formidable. Tenet’s Wikipedia entry explains not only that ‘Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who worked with Nolan on Interstellar (2014), was consulted on the subjects of time and quantum physics’ but that ‘The title is a palindrome, reading the same backwards as forwards’ – as if Nolan had invented the verbal form. Maybe his next masterwork will be Pap. At any rate, the profundities of this one are well disguised by fights, explosions and apparent (this is CGI, after all) trashing of expensive-looking sets. And, in between, bursts of trademark Nolan dialogue – awkwardly ‘witty’ and baldly expository by turns. It nearly stands comparison with a James Bond script.
As usual, Nolan has assembled a large cast led by on-trend actors – Washington (excellent in BlacKkKlansman but, in what I saw, a bit dull here), Robert Pattinson (with an amusing posh accent), Elizabeth Debicki. Her first appearance in Tenet is a highlight, a Modigliani suddenly in motion. Debicki is evidently a good actress. I quickly tuned out of her character’s murmurings and started wondering when – after Widows, Vita & Virginia and now this – she’s going to appear in a good film. Next up for her is Princess Diana in the final series of The Crown: that turned my mind to the idea of height-blind casting or whether they’ll try to cut Debicki down to the original’s size, the way Bennett Miller did so cleverly with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.
Christopher Nolan means to be thought-provoking but not to provoke thoughts like these. After forty-five minutes or so, I didn’t think it was fair on him, let alone me, to carry on watching. I’m grateful I got out when I did. Not everyone could escape this film so easily: Wikipedia also tells us that ‘Washington, Pattinson, and Debicki were each only permitted to read the screenplay while locked in a room’. And whereas during Interstellar time stood still, on this occasion I got home, made a cup of tea, did some reading and marvelled that the screening of Tenet I’d sat down for still wasn’t yet over.
27 August 2020
