Beyond belief
Nolan’s Tenet is a mind-bending film of morality and mortality
The word tenet refers to a core principle or belief held by a person or contained in a philosophy. The word tenant means one who resides in a place long enough to pay rent. You may feel both these definitions weighing on you if you go to see Tenet. It features digressions and discursions into the nature of free will, cause and effect, morality and mortality.
And at two-and-a-half hours, it may make you feel like a permanent resident of whatever cinema you see it in. Choose a comfortable seat.
Also, be prepared to return for a second viewing as soon as possible. I needed one before even trying to start writing this review. The studio reps told me I might have been the first person outside the production company to see it twice. It’ll be a much larger club soon.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s newest, delayed by the pandemic and opening in Canada ahead of its U.S. release for similar reasons, is a mind-bender, a head-scratcher or a brainteaser, depending where you fall on the Cartesian spectrum.
Its adherence to the idea that life can only be understood backward ties it to the director’s 2000 breakthrough, Memento. And its Möbius-strip plot make
the loopiness of 2010’s Inception a dream of comprehension in comparison. I’m not sure what Nolan has up his sleeve for 2030, but I’m already scared.
Tenet opens with a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) taking part in a raid on an opera house in Ukraine. At stake is a weird metal box that looks a bit like an industrial strength hard drive. What is it, you ask? And I ask in return: Do you remember the Solex Agitator that James Bond had to track down in The Man with the Golden Gun? All that mattered was that he got it and Scaramanga didn’t, right? This is the same kind of deal.
Mr. Protagonist then finds himself recruited by Tenet, a shadowy organization that has friends in high places, including Sir Michael Crosby, played by Nolan good luck charm Sir Michael Caine in a cameo that, like so many of the film’s other minor characters, is granted no followup.
Another there-and-gone character is Clémence Poésy, a scientist who explains that the bullet we saw being sucked out of a wall in that opening scene is an example of an object that has been (or will be?) “inverted,” travelling backward through time.
Huh? Well, imagine you come across the remnants of a car crash — bits of broken tail light and metal on the road. Now imagine that was from a collision that is going to happen tomorrow. Or you could take the advice Poésy’s character gives to our man: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”
Tenet thus operates on two levels, sometimes simultaneously. The first is the “understand it” tier, with discussions about a coming war being waged by our own descendants, with weapons, money and information flowing like temporal contraband from the future.
To even begin to get your head around this, recall the grandfather paradox, in which you travel back in time to kill your grandfather — but if you succeed, you’re never born, so you can’t perform the hit. Tenet reminds us that many of us are the great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers of the men and women of the future. Just not yet.
Far more satisfying, at least in the moment, is the “feel it” level of the movie. This is where Washington’s character recruits Neil, played by Robert Pattinson, who at 34 seems to be slowly turning into Jeremy Irons. He also seeks out Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) as a way to get close to Andrei (Kenneth Branagh), a
Russian oligarch who spits and snarls and seems to be at the centre of this temporal maelstrom.
This more visceral track also includes a catamaran race, a car chase and a climactic battle scene, all teased in the trailer. (I started this review with the intention to avoid major spoilers, only to realize that to truly spoil the movie I’d have to understand it, and I’m not there yet.) It also gives Washington the chance to flirt and spar with Kat and Andrei, respectively.
The movie is full of repeatable snippets of dialogue, helpfully repeated. “We’re the people saving the world from what might have been.” “Ignorance is our ammunition.” “We live in a twilight world.” “And there are no friends at dusk.”
Though I wish Nolan had taken more care with the audibility of the dialogue, which is sometimes all but drowned out by Ludwig Göransson’s eight-onthe-richter-scale score. And why on Earth would he craft a scene where two characters, one wearing an oxygen mask, separated by a glass partition, talk in two languages translated through a tinny walkie-talkie? If ignorance is ammunition, that’s some high-calibre stuff.
I also wish Nolan had thrown in a few palindromes aside from the title. “Don’t nod,” say. Or “Never odd or even,” which would have made a great coded greeting.
Regardless, I was glad to see this film, long heralded as the sign that movies are starting to return to the big screen in force. It’s about time.
TENET
★★★★ out of 5
Cast: John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki,
Kenneth Branagh
Director: Christopher Nolan
Duration: 2 h 30 m