Thoughts on going to see Tenet at the cinema

BY ROBERT CHANDLER

Clarity isn’t everything.

Folks have been complaining about critics giving TENET five stars while stating the film is confusing and unclear. 

Peter Bradshaw’s five star review in The Guardian described Nolan’s new movie as a “gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller... madly preposterous... a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination.” He likened it to Boorman’s Point Blank and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in terms of its ability to (not) make sense.

In Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP, Hawks reached a point in the plot where he simply got lost and called in screenwriters Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner to explain. What the hell’s going on? And who killed the chauffeur? They couldn’t answer the director’s questions. Hawks sent a telegram to Chandler. Chandler wired back “Dammit. I don’t know either.”

Does TENET need to make sense? I suspect that critics are not wanting to spoil the “Let’s Get People Back Into The Cinemas” drive of the film and so are choosing to celebrate its big-screen-ness instead. In other words, cutting the film-maker some slack. 

But perhaps Nolan does need to be careful... if MEMENTO and INCEPTION are his two great Puzzle Movies, they work because the thrills they deliver come partly from the rules being followed and our sharing vicariously the consequent implications for the characters. The rules of the two films are stated and the protagonists understand them. However, INCEPTION often feels cold and unengaging emotionally, despite the storyline of the dead wife, because the dialogue is almost all rule exposition. Characters are reduced to being cyphers telling us what is going on during the layering and sideways slides of the film’s magnificent Rubik scenes. There’s no opportunity for feeling or involvement.

One of the lovely things about INTERSTELLAR is that the character work supersedes the plot puzzle. The time that should have been shared between the father and his daughter, which is ripped from both of them when he attempts to save the world, is what the film is about. It’s not about the saving of the world. The father even pleads with himself - via the lovestream timewarp - not to leave on his mission but to stay with her instead. It’s a powerful statement that is at the heart of the movie and it has me in tears every time.

So let’s see what effect TENET has. Whether it moves me or not, I am looking forward to venturing out, masked up, into the dustbowl of my local Cineworld this weekend to surrender to its preposterousness.