In Edison vs. Westinghouse, we’re stuck with electric bill
Two years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, a movie about Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla and, for a climax, the dazzling illumination of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, failed utterly to ignite the movie world.
En route to its premiere, “The Current War” met with more than the usual amount of uber-meddling from distributor Harvey Weinstein. A few weeks after the Toronto festival, The New York Times published the first historymaking story of sexual assault and serial harassment allegations against Weinstein. After decades of one mogul’s predation, suddenly, that was that. The unreleased “Current War,” meantime, went into turnaround and became an asterisk.
Now there’s a director’s cut of “The Current War,” already released in England, featuring newly shot footage, various cuts, reorderings, a new musical score and a 10-minutes-shorter running time. I never saw the earlier version. This one remains a bit of a mess but a pretty interesting one.
Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) sweats like crazy to visually energize a story largely about alternating current versus direct current, embodied by the driven but very different inventors and industrialists at the fictionalized story’s center. Benedict Cumberbatch stews and furrows his way through the role of the distracted Edison, in a performance more concerned with interior tension than audience love. Unkempt and increasingly unscrupulous, Edison lives in the shadow of personal tragedy; Tuppence Middleton portrays his wife in a few quick early scenes.
With the sometime assistance of the brilliant Serbianborn Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), Edison scores an early victory by lighting up a good chunk of New York City with his direct current. His wily but fairminded competitor is Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), boasting the more efficient AC system. Westinghouse’s company powers more and more of the outlying nation, away from Manhattan’s bright lights. And while the movie lacks a conventional structure — it’s based on a musical play screenwriter Michael Mitnick wrote in grad school at Yale — the third act concerns who will win the contract to illuminate the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The movie offers one peculiarity after another. The director’s cut foregrounds the supporting character of Tesla, if only to explain to the audience his relationships to Edison and Westinghouse. (The scene where Tesla’s upbraided by his boss as a measly “immigrant” wasn’t in the original cut.) The current and much-loved “Spider-Man,” Tom Holland, plays Edison’s devoted assistant Samuel Insull. He comes into prominence late in the game; as Marguerite Westinghouse, Katherine Waterston does a lot with a little. Smart actors, and this ensemble’s full of them, know they needn’t do a lot, with elegant period costumes handling so much of the work for them.
Nervous about boring the audience, Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung spin the camera ’round and ’round, here a twirling overhead zoom, there a nostril-proximity fisheye closeup. It’s strenuous, though the settings and production designs shine. The movie, which began filming in late 2016, was made mostly in England, and the digital effects bring the Chicago World’s Fair to life.