Klara and the Sun: Another Brilliant Ishiguro Novel

KLARA AND THE SUN (2021)

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Random House/Penguin, 307 pages

★★★★★

 

 

 

There are reasons why Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro has won most of the major awards a novelist can, including the Whitbread, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Man Booker, and a Nobel. He manages to be an amazing stylist without being pretentious, and he never repeats himself thematically. Consider just a few of his subjects: the Sino-Japanese War (When We Were Orphans), the British aristocracy (Remains of the Day), and a dystopian in which children are raised to become organ donors (Never Let Me Go).

 

In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro turns to what we construe to be the very near future. AI (Artificial Intelligence) has reached advanced levels, and genetic engineering has become commonplace. The titular character is an AF (Artificial Friend), which are all the rage as companions for children bred for superior intellect. Klara has not yet found a home because she’s an older model. There’s something about her, though, that attracts the eye of young Josie, who doesn’t have many friends other than Rick, who has never been “lifted” and comes from a difficult family situation. In addition, Josie’s sister, Sal, is deceased. Chrissie, Josie’s ambitious mother, wants her daughter to get one of the sleek new B3 models, but Josie insists on buying Klara.

 

For an android like Klara, the Sun is godlike, as it replenishes her batteries. She’s a bundle of wires and programming capable of high-level thinking, but Klara is essentially a child, as she knows little of the world except what she observed through the store display window. You will be charmed by Klara, how she learns, what she “feels,” and her skewed look at the world–phones are “oblongs,” for example, and she misreads illogical social situations. Among Klara’s impressions is that the “Cootings Machine”–the name on a piece of construction equipment–is evil and environmentally destructive.

 

Klara is an excellent AF to Josie, who is often ill, perhaps as Chrissie fears, mortally so. We also learn that Chrissie’s ex-husband, Paul, has concerns about how his daughters have been raised. He comes off as a cross between a hippie, a survivalist, and a Luddite, but maybe he’s not a naïf. He is particularly concerned when Chrissie begins taking Josie to a painter named Calpaldi, who also did Sal’s portrait before she died. Is more than painting taking place inside his studio?

 

Klara and the Sun is a fascinating exploration of “humanity.” The novel reminded me of a Star Trek Next Generation episode titled “The Measure of a Man” in which scientist Bruce Maddox wishes to disassemble Data to see if he can be replicated. After all, Data is just a “machine.” Is Klara just a “’bot?” How do we measure humanity? Klara learns, is self-aware, and her programmed emotions are often superior to those fired by biological receptors and neurons. What about GMOs like Josie? Does live birth make her more human than a manufactured sentient being? Once DNA is altered, is a biological child still fully human? Who cares more for Josie: her status-obsessed mother, or a robot who implores the Sun to heal Josie and engages in an unusual escapade she thinks will help? When Calpaldi opines that, “there’s nothing so unique” about humans that “our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, and transfer,” is he offering a dose of harsh truth, or setting the stage for the end of the Anthropocene?

 

What a book! Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, Ishiguro will take you on an intellectual journey that raises many questions and trusts readers to answer them. Many years ago, novelist Philip K. Dick queried whether androids had souls in the ways humans conceptualized them. If consciousness is a measure, Ishiguro suggests that placing robots in the service of a biological species might be a form of enslavement. Is it okay to discard/dismantle a robot whose neural networks continue to function? In our time, much has been about climate change, plague, and war. Maybe this is our version of Data’s dilemma and Calpaldi’s assertion.

 

As only the most confident writers can do, Ishiguro prefers open-ended possibilities to dogmatism. If, however, we believe what AI boosters say, the conundrums Ishiguro posits are ones that will soon jump from the pages of science fiction and into the realms of ethics and politics– two “human” pursuits that historically have not been good friends, AF or biological.

 

Rob Weir

Moonflower Murders Too Long and complex, Yet Rewarding

 

 

 

THE MOONFLOWER MURDERS: MAGPIE MURDERS BOOK 2 (2020)

By Anthony Horowitz

Harper, 608 pages.

★★★★

 

You know you’re in for a complex mystery when the word murder appears in the plural. This one delivers in more ways than one, as it’s also a murder mystery novel that takes us inside another fictional murder mystery.

 

Susan Ryeland is living in Crete, where she runs a boutique hotel with her life/business partner Andreas Patakis. She’s there because she quit her publishing job after the death of Alan Conway, the author of Atticus Pund Takes a Case. He was an unpleasant part of her roster of clients and she wase happy to put that life behind her. If only the hotel wasn’t shedding money like autumn leaves.

 

As fate would have it, Lawrence Treherne offers her $10,000 to come to Sussex as his guest at Branlow Hall, an upscale hotel that puts hers to shame. She naturally wants to know how she, a former publisher, can possibly assist in finding his missing daughter Cicely. Treherne is convinced that the answer lies in Conway’s book, which his daughter was reading when she disappeared, and that Susan can decode it better than anyone. Her curiosity is piqued when she is told that Alan died in the same room in the Mayflower wing of the hotel in which Frank Parris was murdered. Although a Romanian staff member, Stefan Codrescu, was convicted that murder, Treherne thinks maybe Stefan is innocent, though he’s vague on why. It is curious, though, that Parris was killed the very day of Cecily’s in-house wedding.

 

To say that Susan knows her way around a case of souvlaki better than a murder case is an understatement. It doesn’t help that she knows Richard Locke, the detective who investigated Parris’s murder and Cecily’s disappearance, and the two despise each other. That’s pretty much the case with everyone she meets: Treherne’s wife; his older daughter Lisa, who runs the hotel and sees Susan as a sponge; Eloise, the nanny to Cecily’s daughter Roxanna; the Wilsons, who  retained possession of a house Parris wanted to sell; Alan’s ex-wife Melissa, whom he left when he came out as gay; Cicely’s husband Aiden MacNeil; and several others, including the spa and night managers. The plot thickens when Susan learns that Parris served as Alan’s introduction to gay life. Maybe Susan needs to re-read Alan’s novel, which she is loathe to do because she hated it the first time around.

 

The Moonflower Murders is multifaceted–even “The Marriage of Figaro” factors in–which is both a strength and a weakness. As Susan begins to take stock of motives, including who was sleeping with whom, she increasingly feels like she either needs to go back to Andreas or return to publishing–anything except be at Branlow Hall around so many awful people. Just about everyone is a suspect. The only thing she knows for certain is that no one is telling the unvarnished truth and for the life of her, she cannot see how two deaths eight years apart are related to a young mother’s disappearance. For all she can fathom, maybe Cicely is dead and everyone she met had a hand in it. Or perhaps Cicely decided to leave motherhood and her awful family behind and move somewhere like Crete!

 

In a book as multilayered as The Moonflower Murders, logic holes and improbabilities are perhaps inevitable. There are several such moments in the novel and I was not the first to think that several were

unconvincingly contrived. Plus, I always furl my brow when solving a puzzle rests upon obscure clues that require preternatural prescience to consider, let alone identify as key. Horowitz compensates for plot head-scratchers through strong character development. Trust me when I say you will meet numerous hard-to-digest people in this book. Trust me also when I say it’s hard to look away.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

 

What Do You Mean?

 

 

 

As former students can attest, I am a bear about precise wording. For example, I never let history students use the term “American people” and insisted they identify which Americans they meant: men, women, white people, people of color, upper-class Americans, the middle class, working people….

 

In that vein, I have some vocabulary reform suggestions. I'd ban making verbs from perfectly good nouns such as priority or conference. In fact, I support criminal penalties for all business speak. But let's start with a few other words.

 

·      Let’s lose the F-bomb. Nothing says pathetic hipster or junior high school boy like a splatter of F-bombs. The word has become so boorish that it’s used to describe everything except having sex.

 

·      Stop confusing the words hero and victim. If a firefighter risks life and limb to carry someone from a burning building, that's heroic. If the same person perishes with a hose in hand battling a blaze set by an arsonist, that firefighter is a victim. Heroism is a conscious act; victimization is not.

 

·      I've grown suspicious of the label activist, especially when self-applied. Activists place their lives and liberty on the line to redress grievances. Those who lobby elected officials, sign petitions, post on social media, or carry protest signs are not activists; they’re citizens.

 

·      My personal sample is just two, but do you see a groundswell of urgency among people with physical challenges to be called differently abled? The two folks I know well definitely see themselves as disabled and scoff at terms that suggest otherwise.

 

·      I read a lot of literature from indigenous writers. I'm betting if you gave most of them and their constituencies a choice between being called: (A) Native Americans, or (B) Indians, (B) would win in a landslide.

 

·      Can we please make a distinction between racists and fools? Not everything that upsets someone is racist. I recently saw a post from someone–okay, a fool–who insists that the word “jimmies,” as in ice cream sprinkles, is racist because it disrespectfully references blackness. Ummm… they're made of chocolate, not licorice, and it would be an amazing stretch to connect jimmies to something like Jim Crow. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, “If you’ve got nothing to say, the least you can do is shut up about it.”

 

·      Along similar lines, I pay more attention when a person of color uses the term “racist” than when it comes from some privileged white person from tony suburbs.

 

·      The word stupidity knows no racial or class boundaries. It’s not racist or classist to call out African-Americans, Latinos, or poor rural whites for being resistant to being vaccinated against Covid. Sadly, the vax rate among all three is low. That was structural at first–not enough access–but that has given way to paranoia about not trusting the government or the vaccine. Yes, I know about the Tuskegee experiments, thalidomide, and other such horrors, but this isn't the same situation. If there was any validity to assertions that the vaccine is dangerous or a plot to eliminate people of color, the streets would already be littered with deformed white corpses. History should never be an excuse not to flip the calendar forward.

 

·      In the same groove, when did the word rights cease being enumerated Constitutional privileges and mutate into wingnut libertarianism? Rights are not a synonym for the liberty of individuals to do whatever they please. Anyone who thinks they have a “right” to eschew Covid-19 shots is a bio-terrorist. Under what precept of law, civil society, or morality is it acceptable for individuals to jeopardize public health just because they feel like it? If this nonsense continues, I can guarantee another lockdown, probably with an attendant economic collapse. It's time to reclaim what John Dewey called the Great Community. An anti-vaxer has only the right to stay at home. Get vaccinated or no school, no job, no travel. I recall my boyhood when nurses came into my grade school, students lined up, and each got a polio jab. There was no discussion.

 

·      A hoax is something that's not objectively, demonstrably, or scientifically true. It's not the same as something you simply don't wish to believe. To those who think Covid or climate change is a hoax, I can only say I hope the little green men in the Mothership treat you well.

 

·      Religious tolerance must either be universal or abandoned. It cannot, for example, be filtered through a Southern Baptist value system. The founders of the United States knew the history of the Inquisition, the wars of religion, witch trials, and “official” religions. That’s why the Constitution specifies Congress can make “no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Liberals are often as bad, if not worse, than conservatives. If you're one of those with a knee-jerk acceptance of all Muslim beliefs, but ridicule Christians and make Antisemitic remarks, you are merely a bigot with different targets.

 

·      To end on a light note, gardening is agronomy aimed at maximizing the growth of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. People like me are Darwinian scatterers who believe if a plant survives, it was fit enough to do so on its own.

 

Rob Weir

We Begin at the End Complex but Rewarding

 

 

We Begin at the End (2020)

By Chris Whitaker

Henry Holt and Company, 370 pages.

 

Did you ever have a childhood friend, lose touch, and meet again decades later? The first thing that runs through your mind is whether the kid you recall still resides within the adult standing before you. That's the dilemma facing Chief Walker – known to most simply as “Walk”– who now keeps the peace in a small California town near Anaheim. He has never believed that his best buddy, Vincent King, was guilty though he's been in prison since being adjudicated as an adult at age15 for the killing of seven–year–old Sissy Radley.

 

Thirty years later, Vincent is out of jail. Almost immediately, though, he is the prime suspect in the death of Star Radley. There's nothing neat in any part of Chris Whitaker's novel. Everybody either has something to hide or suffering from some deep-seated hurt. The Radley clan isn't exactly a collection of upright citizens. Star was a woman of loose virtue, a drunkard, a stripper, and the rough sex lover of club owner/his developer Dickie Darke, Walk’s chief suspect. Star has also left behind a daughter, Duchess, a foul-mouthed 13-year-old, who calls herself “Outlaw” and tries to act and think like one. 

 

Walk, though, has issues of his own: he's a widower, is emotionally shut down, has been unlucky in the dating scene, and is trying to hide the fact that he has Parkinson's disease. He feels protective of Duchess, in part because his father-in-law's deceased wife was Star’s sister. Outlaw, of course, thinks she needs no one and balks at Walk’s attempt to send her to live with her grandfather.

 

Walk isn’t getting anywhere with an investigation he’s not even supposed to undertake. All of the evidence points directly at Vincent, as State Police remind him. Walk refuses to accept that, but it is patently obvious he continues to see his friend through a 15-year-old’s eyes. Vincent is taciturn, doesn’t insist he’s innocent, won’t say much about his whereabouts when Star was killed, and doesn’t appear to care very much about his fate. Even Milton, the local butcher, testifies he overheard a heated argument between Star and Vincent. Also hanging over Vincent’s head is that he killed another inmate during a prison brawl. To top it off, he wants Martha May to defend him, and that’s pretty messy; she specializes in family law and is one of Walk’s former girlfriends. Even she is receptive to the idea that Vincent might be just what he seems: a cold-hearted murderer.

 

But Walk can't hear any of that. He immediately thinks Darke got to Milton, and begins to poke his nose into Darke’s finances, his real estate dealings, and an offer to buy Vincent’s land. Walk has so many irons in the fire he’d have to be the Hindu goddess Durga to hold them all. Add another arm when Milton’s bloated body is pulled from the water. Walk unearths some shocking secrets about Milton, but that doesn’t make him a perjurer. Nonetheless, Walk again casts his suspicions toward Darke.

 

Believe me when I say I've only uncoiled several of the loosely bound serpentine kinks in a novel that is equal parts a murder mystery, psychological investigation, and thriller.

Whitaker gets credit for understanding that criminal cases are seldom cut and dried. He also knows enough to steer clear of easy answers, black and white morality, and omniscient investigators. We come to imagine that Walk is really trying to recover his own 15-year-old self to deal with his discomfort with adult life, but is that so? I will say only that the book wends its way toward a towards a shocking and surprising ending that's not entirely of the happy-ever-after variety.

 

Complexity is the strength and perhaps a curse of We Begin at the End. There are many characters, motives, and personae to be juggled. In essence, Whitaker has constructed a thinking person’s puzzle that some readers may find akin to one of those 12,000-piece jigsaws that sits on library tables and takes a village to assemble. It’s not always a breezy read, but in my estimation, it’s worth plowing through. Whitaker is a very good writer who diverts our attention elsewhere when he tiptoes toward the melodramatic. He is also skillful enough that we often forget that the book’s structure is circular. He tricks us again with a title that can and should be taken several ways.

 

Many psychologists claim that our basic personalities are formed during childhood, though they generally fudge that assertion by noting that moral development comes a bit later. So, do we “know” a 45-year-old who was our best friend at 15? Don't be sure that you do. Don't be sure that you don't!

 

Rob Weir

The Mystery of Mystic

 

No, this is not a ghost story. Last year I posted a short blog on Mystic, Connecticut, after a quick stop for lunch at Mystic Pizza. That you may recall was the site of a 1988 Roberts film that propelled her to fame. I vowed to return to Mystic when I had time.

 

Recently I did so. I also posted a blog on the negative changes at Mystic Seaport that place it fully in the Not-Worth-the-Money category. So, the open question now is whether one should bother to visit Mystic at all. Short answer: Yes, if you're in the area and have other things to do to occupy the half a day you'll have left.

 

I say half a day, because Mystic’s other big tourist roll is its aquarium. It's perfectly OK, but it too is overpriced. Depending on the time of day it will set you back between $35-39 and is pricey for an experience that will only take you about 90 minutes. To put it in perspective, the admission charge is the same as the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and there is simply no comparison between the two. You can also make your way to Boston for a better watery experience at the New England Aquarium for a third of the price.

 

 

 

What's left to commend Mystic? First, it's a charming setting in a good place to stroll about. Because of tourists, there were more shops than you would expect for a village of just 4,249 people. I wouldn't call the offerings unique, but browsing is in order and you might find a treasure or two.

 

Not the Seaport, but it's just up around the bend to the left

 

Second, the Mystic River has its charms. The walks along its banks on either side of the Bridge off Water Street are short, but give you a sufficiently nautical salt water-mixed-with-fresh taste and you can fortify yourself with ice cream of other treats. On one side of the bridge, you can actually stroll around the inlet to the gated edge of Mystic Seaport, spy a few wooden boats, and keep your Andrew Jacksons safely tucked into your wallet.

 

 

 

Speaking of the bridge–officially known as the Mystic River Bascule Bridge–it's a free cheap thrill to watch it open (every 40 minutes after the hour). It has massive concrete counterweights that rise and lower is if a giant ogre was about the club or someone. Walker' line up behind a trestle to gawk and the whole thing is a much bigger thrill than one might imagine. 

 

IMHO, though, Mystic’s three big drawls are pizza, Sift Bake Shop, and the Mystic Art Museum. Mystic Pizza, as I previously wrote, is a bit of a fiction, but the ‘za is good. Other pizzerias around town rival it if the wait is too long. In fact, I'd recommend Sift as a better place for lunch. The place is a treat for the eyes as well as the tummy with pastries and sandwiches that are almost too spectacular to eat. One caution: Their giant croissants look better than they are. Stay clear of anything other than plain or chocolate. But the brownies… Oh my! My muffuletta was also superb.

 

I like small institutions, and the middle of town Mystic Art Association Museum is also a rare thing in town that's free. Check it out. You may not know most of the artists, but in the 1920s/30s Mystic had a vibrant art colony. Below find some of the artists and works I liked. There are more, so feel free to let me know your favorites.

 

 

 

Gertrude Schell "Paris Cafe" 

Earl Kenneth Bates, "Autumnal" Reminds me of Canada's Tom Thompson

Julian Joseph, "Mystic River"

Katharine Forest, "A Day in Noank"

Robert Backman (one of the colony founders), "Reclining Nude," an homage to Ingres' "Grande Odalisque"

Walter Milton Killam, "Noank Fishing Village" 

 

 

Art Road Trip Bennington, Vermont I

Performative Acts

Dona Ann McAdams

Through August 15, 2021

 

Robert Frost in Vermont

Through November 7, 2021

 

Selections from the Permanent Collection

Bennington Museum of Art

 

A few weeks ago, we decided to get out of the Pioneer Valley to visit one of our favorite small art museums in Bennington, Vermont. One of the shows there–alas, closing soon–are the photos of Dona Ann McAdams. Her work is often compared to that of Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier-Bresson in that she is fond of candid photography, though her work is more overtly feminist than that of Lange, the images less soft focus-wise than those of Cartier-Bresson, and ARE more confrontationally political than either of them. The Bennington exhibit samples work from past McAdams retrospectives and is heavy on wit and irony, but also touches upon her deep commitment to social justice.

 

The gallery has harsh lighting, but here are several images that say more than I can about them. You will notice, though, that McAdams (b. 1954) likes ironic juxtapositions.

 

  

 

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

The leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sunk to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

 

Few 20^th century poets were as celebrated as Robert Frost (1874-1963). His poetic reputation has faded a bit in our jaded age. To some critics, Frost’s works seem antiquated, his rhymes straightforward, his subjects naively apolitical, and his tone homiletic. Yeah, yeah. His are still among the most memorable lines in the English language. Frost’s fame remains such that three New England states–Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont–try to claim him and each has a case, as he lived in all three. There’s a bust of him at Amherst College, where he once taught, and its library is named for him. New Hampshire is one of the places where he failed as a farmer. But given that his physical remains lie in a Bennington churchyard, he taught at Middlebury College, and lived in Shaftsbury part of the year from 1920 on, Vermont has maybe the best claim.

 

 

Bennington has a show linked to Frost’s time in Vermont. How, you might wonder, does an art museum display a poet? A few objects are obvious, such as his chair and portable writing desk. That assemblage looks all the world like an outtake from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

 

For much of the rest, though, curators chose paintings and graphics that evoke Frost’s favorite subjects: the New England landscape, weather, its beauty, and the precariousness of existence in what can be an unforgiving region. The images come with snippets of his poetry and there are several sound files of him reading his works. Here are several evocative images. 

 

 

 

Above: Top to Bottom--Rockwell Kent "Puritan Church;" Arthur Burton, "Putney Melting;" Lucius Lankes, "Vermont Farmhouse"

 

 

I’ll be frank, though. The show is too text heavy for an art museum, so if you’re the impatient sort, take a notebook with you, jot down titles of the mentioned poems, find them later, and savor them at your leisure. Here’s a famous one–“Fire and Ice”– that’s  distressingly appropriate for both the flinty hardness of the New England landscape and a nod to our time of plague and climate change.    

 

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

 

No pictures are allowed in the Grandma Moses exhibit which is housed in the refurbished schoolhouse wing. So instead, here’s an eclectic sample of images from the rest of the permanent collection–just for the heck of it.

 

From the Vermont Modernists: Francis Colburn, “Family Group” (1939); John Atherton, “The Ore Pit” (1947).

 

 

 

Ever wonder what happens to displays at a World’s Fair when the gates close for the last time. Sometimes they end up in museums. This over-the-top ceramic was first seen at the 1853 Crystal Palace fair in London, which is often said to be the first modern world’s fair. Bennington was once a center of ceramics manufacturing, but now this piece looks like a harbinger of Gilded Age excess. 

 

 

 

Speaking of the Gilded Age, Brattleboro is at the other end Molly Stark Trail, but Bennington holds a fine example of an Estey organ such as a Gilded Age family seeking instant cred might have plopped in the parlor, even if no one could actually play it.

 

 

 

Finally, when did the ideal of American democracy disappear? I’d have to cogitate upon that, but it was alive in 1927, when Harriet Miller titled this sculpture “Democracy.”  

 

 

The Current War Fails to Sizzle

 

 

 

THE CURRENT WAR (2017/19)

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejan

101 Studios, 107 minutes, PG-13

★★ 1/2

 

The Current War depicts the late 19^th century race between Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) to provide electricity to American businesses and homes. Its route to North American cinemas was, shall we say, short-circuited. It was released in Britain in 2017, and was slated for distribution here by Harvey Weinstein Productions. Unless you’ve been napping on the dark side of the moon, you know why that plan ran into trouble. It took some time before 101 Studios acquired distribution rights, though it’s arguable whether it was worth the effort.

 

Without getting all geeky about it, the gist of the matter was which system was most feasible, Edison’s Direct Current or Westinghouse’s Alternating Current. Edison was first to the table and made money on installing DC for businesses, but his system required a lot of machinery and had a very short coverage area. He also made the boneheaded maneuver of hiring a bright young immigrant, Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Holt) to work for him. Tesla was under the impression that Edison would bankroll some of his innovations, whereas Edison saw him as just another hireling whose main job was to stroke his ego and enhance his reputation as a genius. Tesla eventually quit and took his talents to Westinghouse, who also treated him shabbily. As we know, however, Westinghouse’s AC won the day, nearly bankrupted Edison in the process, delayed Tesla’s acclaim, and relied upon banker/investor J. P. Morgan (Matthew Macfadyen) to bankroll it. Guess who got a massive share of the profits.

 

There’s not inherently unique about Gilded Age magnates battling or cheating one another, so director Alfronso Gomez-Rejan tried to interject tension wherever he could, though most of the movie’s dramatic moments call out for the qualifier “melo.” The women of the film­–Westinghouse’s wife Marguerite (Katherine Wilkerson) and Edison’s first wife Mary (Tuppence Middleton)–are there to cheer on their men folk or, in Marguerite’s case, to encourage ruthlessness. (Yes, this is another film in which women are appendages.) Gomez-Rejan develops the relationship between the respective collaborators of Edison and Westinghouse–Samuel Insull (Tom Holland) and Franklin Pope (Stanley Townshend)–better than those of their wives. Loyalties are tested and shifted and details are added, such as the first criminal electrocution (of William Kemmler) and the lighting of the 1886 World’s Fair. These ostensibly add color to Michael Mitnick’s script, but they come off more as padding than exposition.

 

There is a tangible sense that this entire project sounded better in the planning stage than it turned out in the studio. I am generally a Cumberbatch fan, but the problems begin with him. He doesn’t look a thing like Edison and though the latter was known for being difficult, pigheaded, and driven, his intensity was of a different quality than Cumberbatch’s, which is geared more toward nervous energy leavened with snark. To up the sense of competition, the film casts Edison as the villain, Tesla as a victim, and Westinghouse as sympathetic. That’s all very neat, but not very accurate.

 

Films “inspired by” real events often take liberties, so one might be tempted to dismiss my previous critique. I would as well, had I been drawn in better. The Current War isn’t terrible, just bland. If you will, the major problem with The Current War is that it simply doesn’t spark.

 

Rob Weir