60 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENTCINEMA
TIME AND AGAIN
“ Tenet.”BY ANTHONYLANEW
ord 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 mechan-
ics are shouted at you in fluent Espe-
ranto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan
fiddles with the sound mix of the movie,
thus drowning out important conversa-
tions. If you thought that Bane, the vil-
lain 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 Protag-
onist,” denying us a handhold on his iden-
tity. If only he were called Rodney or Lit-
tle 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 pres-
ent 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 Bar-
bara (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. Bar-
bara 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 com-
ing war.” One way to get to that detritus—
chunky whatchamacallits that somehow
enable chronological slippage—is via
Sator’s willowy English wife, Kat (Eliz-
abeth 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. Any-
one 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 be-
fore. Sator, being a rich daredevil, races
his catamaran at such a lick that it al-
most flies over the waves, but then so
did the title character in “The Thomas
Crown Affair” (1999). And, while it’s al-
ways 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 may-hem, 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 thun-
derous panache, I couldn’t help reflect-
ing 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 im-
peding the Protagonist are—brace your-
self—travelling in the opposite direction
through time. (If you crash into some-
one 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 gran-
deur is no guarantee of impact. The cli-
max, in which two military forces lock
horns in a bleak Siberian quarry, one of
them fighting forward and the other fight-
ing backward, or something, is less mem-
orable than the all-too-human baffle-
ment that you glimpse on the Protagonist’s
face when muddy water, caught in a mi-
raculous anti-splash, slurps back from his
boot onto the ground. All those special
effects, piled high like Christmas pres-
ents, and what stays with you is a puddle.T
hrough 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 lum-
bered with the duties of a messiah. Being ABOVE: LALALIMOLA