The Cur­rent War

Despite being one of the most beloved Amer­i­can cul­tur­al fig­ures of all time, there hasn’t been a biopic about Thomas Edi­son since 1940, when Mick­ey Rooney and Spencer Tra­cy por­trayed the inven­tor at dif­fer­ent stages of his life in com­pan­ion films Young Tom Edi­son and Edi­son, the Man. Per­haps Amer­i­cans just aren’t as obsessed with biopics as the British, but it’s curi­ous that the man regard­ed as one of the found­ing fathers of the motion pic­ture should be con­spic­u­ous­ly absent from them. 

Even Alfon­so Gomez-Rejon’s The Cur­rent War, which tells the sto­ry of Edison’s rival­ry with George West­ing­house and Niko­la Tes­la, almost didn’t see the light of day, being one of two films caught up in the dis­tri­b­u­tion chaos that ensued fol­low­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of The Wein­stein Com­pa­ny (the oth­er being Neil Burger’s The Untouch­ables remake, The Upside). Still, it’s here now, some two years after pre­mier­ing at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, with a heavy­weight cast and some swoop­ing cam­era work from Park Chan-wook’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Chung Chung-hoon.

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch plays Edi­son with the same fast-talk­ing man­ner he seems to adopt in all his Amer­i­can roles. It feels anachro­nis­tic giv­en the 19^th cen­tu­ry set­ting, a con­trast from Michael Shannon’s more states­man­ly George West­ing­house, resplen­dent with a hand­some mous­tache. For what it’s worth, Tup­pence Mid­dle­ton gets a raw deal as Mary Stil­well Edi­son, Edison’s sup­port­ive but neglect­ed wife, whose untime­ly death pro­found­ly affects him for about five min­utes. Kather­ine Water­ston fairs a lit­tle bet­ter as Westinghouse’s wife, Mar­guerite Ersk­ine, but only just – there’s more char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion giv­en to Matthew Macfadyen’s stuffy banker JP Mor­gan than the women clos­est to the elec­tric­i­ty magnates.

At Cumberbatch’s side is per­ma-perky Tom Hol­land as Edison’s assis­tant, Samuel Insull, while Nicholas Hoult game­ly sports a Russ­ian accent and some styl­ish togs to por­tray the inven­tor Nico­la Tes­la, wide­ly regard­ed as Edison’s great­est rival in the race to bring elec­tric­i­ty to the mass­es. The tus­sle con­cerns Edison’s ​‘DC’ direct cur­rent, and West­ing­house and Tesla’s ​‘AC’ alter­nat­ing cur­rent, and the war waged in the papers and behind closed doors to dis­cred­it one another.

There are some tru­ly strange and dis­tract­ing styl­is­tic choic­es – Chung-hoon’s dis­tinc­tive cam­er­a­work feels at odds with the peri­od set­ting, as does Hausch­ka and Dustin O’Halloran’s some­times elec­tron­ic, some­times strings score. While the real-life sto­ry of The War of the Cur­rents is fas­ci­nat­ing, it makes for a fair­ly mid­dling screen dra­ma. There isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a fatal flaw in the film, it’s more that it inspires only apa­thy, offer­ing very lit­tle in the way of insight. Giv­en the sub­ject mat­ter, it’s a dis­ap­point­ing­ly unstim­u­lat­ing affair.