Word has it that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” is hard to understand. Not so. It’s a cinch—no more difficult than, say, playing mah-jongg inside a tumble dryer, while the principles of quantum mechanics are shouted at you in fluent Esperanto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan fiddles with the sound mix of the movie, thus drowning out important conversations. If you thought that Bane, the villain in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), verged on the inaudible, wait for the folks in “Tenet.” Most of them make Bane sound like Julie Andrews.
The protagonist of the new film is listed in the end credits as “The Protagonist,” denying us a handhold on his identity. If only he were called Rodney or Little Merv. Of his background we know next to nothing, though I happen to love that lack; one sure sign of an action hero is the trading of personal history for present cool. Hence the opening sequence of “Tenet,” in which the Protagonist—played by John David Washington, whose nonchalant intensity lent such verve to “BlacKkKlansman” (2018)—is tested for initiative and spunk during a terrorist attack on an opera house in Ukraine. Who are the attackers, what do they want, and what’s our guy doing there? Search me. The point is that, having aced the test, he is given his next task. Think of it as “Mission: Indecipherable.”
The nuts and bolts of the assignment are laid out by a scientist named Barbara (Clémence Poésy). We know that she’s a scientist, because she wears a white coat; either that, or she’s a fishmonger who moonlights in techno-ballistics. She shows the Protagonist a gun that sucks bullets out of their target and back into the chamber—a feat of amazingness that is triggered neither by magnetism nor by magic but by a reversal of time. Barbara describes the bullets as inverted. “Someone’s manufacturing them in the future,” she says, looking a bit glum. Maybe she just got bad news from 2050.
Anyway, here’s the scoop. A Russian arms dealer, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), is trading not in regular weapons but in what Barbara calls “the detritus of a coming war.” One way to get to that detritus—chunky whatchamacallits that somehow enable chronological slippage—is via Sator’s willowy English wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who regards him with fear and loathing but is forced, for the sake of their young son, to stick around. The Protagonist’s plan is as follows: make nice to Kat, and take it from there. Anyone who saw the TV adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager,” in which a secret agent had to drift into the orbit of a wealthy arms dealer (whose English girlfriend was played by, yes, Elizabeth Debicki) will know the territory. Look out for large yachts.
“Tenet” is a two-hundred-million-dollar charm bracelet, strung with one shiny set piece after another. If some of the charms are slightly tarnished, it may be because we’ve seen their glitter before. Sator, being a rich daredevil, races his catamaran at such a lick that it almost flies over the waves, but then so did the title character in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1999). And, while it’s always refreshing to see a 747—a real one, not a model—trundle grandly into an airport building and burst into flames, the sight of 007 preventing similar mayhem, by the merest squeak, in “Casino Royale” (2006), was no less fun. As for the vehicle chase along a freeway, with some drivers trying their luck against the flow of traffic, well, although Nolan stages the chaos with his usual thunderous panache, I couldn’t help reflecting that, for Jason Bourne, heading the wrong way up a busy road is pretty much a daily commute. So, what’s new?
The answer is that the vehicles impeding the Protagonist are—brace yourself—travelling in the opposite direction through time. (If you crash into someone from the past, don’t even think about calling your insurance company. Just pay up.) Such is the Möbius strip into which this movie twists itself, and, rather than getting tangled up in it, you might as well sit back and enjoy the discombobulating show. Wrecked buildings rear up and self-repair before your eyes; explosions funnel down and taper to nothingness. What’s curious, however, is that grandeur is no guarantee of impact. The climax, in which two military forces lock horns in a bleak Siberian quarry, one of them fighting forward and the other fighting backward, or something, is less memorable than the all-too-human bafflement that you glimpse on the Protagonist’s face when muddy water, caught in a miraculous anti-splash, slurps back from his boot onto the ground. All those special effects, piled high like Christmas presents, and what stays with you is a puddle.
Through no fault of its own, “Tenet” has become a Brian of a film. In other words, it is a decent, generous, and far from perfect entity that has been lumbered with the duties of a messiah. Being the first blockbuster to be released for public viewing since the reign of COVID-19, it bears with it the hopes of an entire industry. Will people rise from their couches and, having weighed their craving for collective entertainment against the risk to their health, flock once more to the pictures?
Time will tell—although time, as “Tenet” demonstrates, should not be trusted. As of September 3rd, it is showing in all but five states, New York and California being two of the five. The cavernous IMAX auditorium in London in which I saw the movie was decidedly unthronged; of more than seven hundred seats, roughly a tenth were occupied. Studio accountants will soon gather, muttering, around the box-office returns, like ancient priests inspecting the entrails of a sheep. What will count, in such eager divination, is not “Tenet” alone but the competing figures for Disney’s “Mulan,” which, forgoing a theatrical release, will be streamed into the living rooms of American viewers, at thirty dollars a pop.
What if “Mulan” cleans up, and “Tenet” falls on its ass? Might other filmmakers not cut their losses and switch their loyalties to the small screen—that homely and unmysterious shrine, where nobody needs to sanitize? One could argue that, given a year or two, and a vaccine, we will return to our ticketed seats and our sodas, but I can all too easily imagine a permanent failure of our nerve. The idea of mustering in the dark, among strangers, staring up at a bright screen, and watching a story unfold has been around for only a century and a quarter, and our faith in it has been waning for decades; maybe COVID-19 will complete the process. Some habits, once broken, are never resumed.
Either way, whether “Tenet” winds up as the savior of cinema or as the portent of doom, it’s the right film for the job. It both gleams with high-concept modernity and gazes hungrily back at earlier moviegoing joys. The old visual thrill, long muted by mass tourism, of seeing beautifully dressed characters hop from one location to the next receives a peculiar boost, in these quarantine-ridden days, from Nolan’s extravagant plot; O happy Protagonist, swanning from London to Mumbai, Tallinn, and the Amalfi Coast just when the rest of us can’t! The lushest spectacle of all is that of Robert Pattinson, who plays the Protagonist’s very British sidekick. He has a master’s in physics, a firm grasp of the Estonian language, and a forelock for which the past and the future might well, with good reason, go to war. Ellen Page, with her sportive smile, brought a leavening amusement to Nolan’s “Inception” (2010), and Pattinson, loucheness incarnate, does the same for “Tenet.”
The problem that dogs this film is not its complexity. Indeed, many fans will delight in unpicking the clever clues that stitch the tale together. No, what strikes you is how determinedly bare of feeling it seems, even when emotional opportunities present themselves. Thus, the Protagonist is drawn to Kat, and you want them to want each other, yet his efforts to rescue her from her fiend of a husband, though noble, have a procedural rather than a passionate air. That dryness reaches into the smallest nooks of the narrative; gold bars, for instance, tumble from the belly of the 747, clinking on the asphalt, but when you think of the comparable moment at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956), in which stolen banknotes are strewn beside a plane, what you recall is the robber’s agonized expression, as his ill-gotten gains swirl away like moths in the night. No such agony ever troubles “Tenet.”
Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response. Although “Tenet” is dazzling and deft, rarely does it pause, as “Orpheus” does, to savor the strangeness of its own creations. Does Christopher Nolan flinch from what he might find there, like someone afraid to analyze his dreams? Maybe he hasn’t got the time. ♦
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“Tenet” is Dazzling, Deft, and Devoid of Feeling - The New Yorker
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