'The Current War' Director’s Cut: Edison Fights Westinghouse Over Electricity, With Tesla As Third Wheel [Review]

Many people probably told the filmmakers behind “The Current War”—finally being released in a director-approved edit after another cut preferred by Harvey Weinstein received a poor reception at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival—that a story about the debate over whether the standard for electricity should be direct or alternating current would not make for particularly engaging drama. If so, those people were mostly right. The figures behind the AC/DC war of the 1880s and ‘90s were certainly larger than life, and so that is where screenwriter Michael Mitnick and director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon put most of their energies. But there is just no getting around the fact that this is a drama about men in top hats arguing over the best electrical current to use.

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For his part in this curious conflict is Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch), insisting DC is best mostly because that is what he has committed to and it is too late to turn back now. Played as a fast-talking, monomaniacal, and frequently irritating but nevertheless rakishly charming egghead, Cumberbatch’s Edison is related to his Sherlock Holmes, only slightly less caffeinated and relocated from London to New Jersey. At the start of the movie in 1880, Edison is at the top of his game. Already a celebrity for his inventions, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” has turned his prodigious mind to electricity. Following an eerily shot set-piece in which a gaggle of businessmen tromp through a dark field to find Edison inside concentric circles of gleaming light bulbs, the inventor is reveling in his fame during a ceremony that electrifies a quadrant of downtown Manhattan. The gleam in his eyes seems almost as much due to the success of his lighting experiment as it is from the applause; not for nothing is he later warned to not end up like P.T. Barnum.

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On the other side of the divide is George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), a stolid industrialist committed to AC because it seems to work better, more cheaply, and over a longer distance than DC. In awe of Edison’s genius but irritated by the more frenetic glory seeker’s ugly tactics, Westinghouse pursues his fight for the future of an electrified nation with tactically skilled diligence. Most filmmakers would have been tempted to play this rivalry as one of upstart brilliance versus stodgy capitalism, a 19th-century preview of Apple versus Microsoft. But in a fresh twist helped along by Shannon’s surprising ability to channel stoic decency, Westinghouse is presented in counterintuitively heroic terms as a moral sort who agonizes over laying off workers and would just as soon work rather than compete with Edison. For his part, Edison comes off as thin-skinned and mercurial, desperate to leave a legacy, press-hungry, and all too willing to drop his loudly proclaimed stance against designing anything lethal once he realizes it can give him a leg up on Westinghouse.

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Bobbling in between these titans of industry is the free radical Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult). A Serbian immigrant, snooker-playing, beautifully outfitted dandy with a sharp mustache and a third eye for what the future will bring. Taken advantage of by Edison and others, Tesla finds a berth with Westinghouse just as he is entering the final stage of the current war: winning the contract over lighting the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

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“The Current War” could have used much more of Tesla, a mystical historical figure who except for David Bowie’s gloriously magic-bedecked turn in “The Prestige,” has yet to get a proper biopic treatment. Too often, the story tracks Westinghouse and Edison in their separate fiefdoms, plotting and counter-plotting their next move for market dominance. Gomez-Rejon stylizes these moments into moody segments of dramatized futurism, replete with sharp-angled camerawork and a roiling ambient soundscape. During the period when Edison was dragging journalists to watch him electrocute animals to illustrate the supposedly fatal nature of Westinghouse’s DC electricity (creepy and all too true), Gomez-Rejon inserts an elegant miniature montage composed of actual Edison film strips of animals. While not always enticing as storytelling, this stylization nevertheless makes for curious and eye-catching cinema.

The eye-candy aspect of the filmmaking occasionally gets the better its makers. For the most part, the cinematography—by Chung-hoon Chung, who was responsible for “The Handmaiden“—is beautiful and epic in scope. But the heavy-handed CGI backgrounds creates a somewhat overstuffed look to the mise en scene that detracts from the characters. The filmmakers are so eager for the movie not to look or sound like a period drama that they pay less attention than they should have to a screenplay that too often falls back on heavy-handed Great Men of History shtick. [B-]