BENDING TIME: Bond- esque thriller “Tenet” is a dazzling, cerebral spectacle
Maybe it is our collective enslavement to the superhero- industrial complex, but right now the movie world is looking for a savior. If it turns out to be Christopher Nolan, it wouldn’t be the first time: Films of his, like “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk,” have, in years past, “saved” summers, reputations, studios.
His “Dark Knight” trilogy sure saved the Warner Bros.- DC partnership — in fact possibly he saved that a bit too hard, with franchise filmmakers ever since toiling in his shadow. Can Nolan save cinema from the coronavirus, its deadliest foe yet? Perhaps, if COVID- 19 can be tripped up by the grandfather paradox or has a hitherto undiscovered weakness for sharp tailoring.
The hotly anticipated “Tenet” is reassuringly massive in every way — except thematically. Ideally presented in 70- millimeter IMAX, Nolan’s preferred, towering aspect ratio, arrayed with the telegenic faces of a cast of incipient superstars, gorgeously shot across multiple global locations and pivoting on an elastic, time- bending conceit ( more on that later/ earlier), the film is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess. This would hardly be a criticism of any other blockbuster. But Nolan is, by several exploding foot
Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” is “the” film of the summer, and is eagerly anticipated by theaters in need of a savior. ball fields, the foremost auteur of the “intellectacle,” which combines popcorndropping visual ingenuity with all the sedate satisfactions of a medium- grade Sudoku. Within the context of this self- created brand of brainiac entertainment, “Tenet” meets all expectations, except the expectation that it will exceed them. Forgive the circularity of this argument: it’s a side effect of watching the defiantly circular “Tenet.”
With unforeseen irony, the film, which will be largely shown in limitedcapacity theaters, begins in a packed auditorium. It is an opera house in Kyiv and it is being held up. One of the attackers, superbly played by John David Washington, reveals himself to be a CIA agent who has infiltrated the operation to rescue an asset, when a curious thing happens. A bullet, fired by an unknown ally, reverses out of a nearby seat, the wood around the bullet hole desplintering. Scarcely has the agent time to wonder, palindromically, “Huh?” when he is distracted by
Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington in “Tenet,” which opened in the U. S. on Sept. 3. having to save hundreds of civilians from certain death.
We are a scant few minutes into the film’s 2 ½
- hour run time and it has already delivered: the sequence ends with interior and exterior shots of an explosion, which the editor Jennifer Lame transforms with as perfect an action cut as ever there was. In that microsecond, we’re reminded of something the last few months have conspired to make us forget: cinematic scale. “Tenet” operates on a physiological level, in the stomach- pit rumbles of Ludwig Goransson’s score, and the dilatedpupil responses to Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which delivers the same magnificence whether observing a narratively superfluous catamaran race, or the nap and weave of Jeffrey Kurland’s immaculately creaseless costumes. Seriously, the most mind- boggling aspect of “Tenet” might be the ironing budget.
Washington’s unnamed character is quickly inducted into the mysteries of “inversion,” a process by which an object — or a person — can have its entropy reversed, making it appear, to those of us moving lamely forward through time, as if it is spooling backward. His new inversionrelated mission leads him first to a fixer, Neil ( a delightful Robert Pattinson), useful for both his action chops and his master’s in physics, then to a Mumbai arms dealer ( Dimple Kapadia), whose fortress apartment can only be accessed by bungee jump, and thence to the villainous Ukrainian squillionaire
Andrei Sator ( Kenneth Branagh), who can only be accessed via his wife, Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki), a miserable, imperiled art dealer who loathes him.
For once, spoiler sensitivity might be the reviewer’s luckiest break, absolving me of even attempting an explanation of a plot so contorted it’s best not to worry about it. Even the scientist played by Clémence Poésy, here exclusively to deliver exposition, eventually cops out. “Don’t try to understand it, feel it” is the best advice anyone offers.
Suffice to say, the timeinversion idea is most impressive not in the film’s grander architecture, which, as widely surmised, loosely resembles a palindrome, but in single scenes in which some elements run forward while others reverse. Similar to “Inception,” which created an entire dream- world mythology only to have its revolving- hallway tussle become its most iconic sequence, in “Tenet,” time inversion poses a civilizationannihilating threat, but the killer scene is, again, a corridor fight. We see it twice, and each time, after your brain clicks to one of the combatants fighting forward in time while the other goes backward, the sheer how- did- they- do- that ingenuity is dazzling.
“Tenet” dazzles the senses, but it does not move the heart — a criticism common to all of Nolan’s original films. And other widely recognized Nolan blind spots are also in evidence: it’s depressing that as fine an actress as Debicki should be saddled with such a cipher role, given a son in lieu of a character and made responsible for the story’s only bad decisions. Everyone else performs to perfection, especially Washington’s historyless protagonist who proves that not all superheroes wear capes.