Tenet (2020)
More like "10et" cuz this movie's a 10.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: To celebrate April 1st and our (belated) 100th post, we’re taking a break from the films of the ‘60s to talk about Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, Tenet.
Look, we’ve covered movies that are 10 out of 10s before. High Noon. From Here to Eternity. Elmer Gantry. To Kill a Mockingbird. But those movies all suck compared to Tenet.
PLEASE WATCH TENET. IT’S WORTH IT. IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, JUST WATCH THE OPENING SCENE. LISTEN TO HOW LOUD IT IS. IT’S SO LOUD! THE MUSIC IS SO OPPRESSIVE! YOU CAN’T EVEN HEAR THE DIALOGUE!
If you’re not gonna watch it, here’s the vibe (and spoilers): the Protagonist (John David Washington) is recruited by mysterious organization Tenet to face down a threat from the future. But Tenet’s hook is its novel take on time travel: characters either travel forward through time linearly (exactly like you’re doing right now) or they’re “inverted” and move backward through time at that same rate (not really like what you’re doing right now).
When characters are inverted, they’re still out and about, doin’ stuff and affecting each moment they’re in—even if it’s one they’ve lived through. Importantly, the characters experience their individual narratives linearly, meaning their past, present, and future selves are all functionally different people, even when they overlap in time. We follow the Protagonist as he moves forwards and backwards through time, watching him fight his future self, then watching him fight his past self as his once-future, now-present self, then seeing him learn that his future self founded Tenet. Whoa.
Again and again, the film asks questions about free will and changing the past, and it resolves on this answer: “What’s happened’s happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world—it’s not an excuse to do nothing.” It’s all very cool.
Rating: 10/10, I can’t believe next week we have to go back to watching movies from 1968.
Cast and Crew
John David Washington is the son of Gladiator II (2024) star Denzel Washington. JDW hasn’t yet scored a Best Actor nomination, but I wouldn’t count him out: he was amazing in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018), an awesome film that shoulda won Best Picture.1 He’s also taken some big swings—one in fellow nepo baby Sam Levinson’s dirge Malcolm & Marie (2021) and another with David O. Russell in the messy Amsterdam (2022).
Robert Pattinson shot to stardom with the roles of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and some Wizard Stuff (2005) and Edward Cullen in the Twilight: Vampires ‘n’ Werewolves series. But then Pattinson made a capital-A Actor move: he went from billion-dollar franchise films to making indie movies with visionary directors. It’s a pretty big zag to go from being a sparkly vampire to working with David Cronenberg, the Safdie brothers, and Robert Eggers.
And then—and only then—did he take on the role of Batman. Is The Batman (2022) a good movie? No. But hey, I respect the hell out of Robert Pattinson.
Oh god, I have to talk about Christopher Nolan? Uh, he makes good, kinda twisty movies. That should be enough. But because bar trivia is dominated by the particular kind of nerd who has a fascination with Christopher Nolan, I’ve gotta tell you every single movie he’s made this millennium. Let’s make this quick:
Memento (2000). Guy Pearce has short-term memory loss and tattoos.
Insomnia (2002). Al Pacino can’t sleep and isn’t a good detective.
The Batman trilogy: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Don’t worry, there’s enough dudes talking about superheroes on the internet, we won’t add to that.
The Prestige (2006). Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman do magic—but the real magic was how it made The Illusionist (also 2006) disappear.
Inception (2010). Leonardo DiCaprio is dreaming, or maybe he’s not, and whether or not he was was a really big deal in 2010.
Interstellar (2014). Matthew McConaughey goes between stars to save Earth and learns that love transcends time or distance or whatever.
Historical dramas: Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023). Dunkirk was about the 1940 evacuation of British troops from France. Oppenheimer was the sequel to Barbie (2023).
Quick Hits:
Kenneth Branagh gives an entirely deranged performance as Tenet’s villain. He’ll eventually become one of our column’s main characters.
Elizabeth Debicki has a real “supermodel-slash-alien” vibe, which is probably why she has the role of “alien lady” in two Guardians of the Galaxy movies. She also played the non-alien Princess Diana in the fifth and sixth seasons of “The Crown.”
The Trivia
Part of Tenet revolves around a forgery of a Goya painting, so let’s talk about Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828). Goya is considered the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns: he mastered traditional techniques and then made artistic choices that anticipated modern art movements. You’ll see a pretty wide range of styles in the pieces shown below.
Goya began as a court painter for the Spanish royal family in the late 18th century. In that role, he did, yawn, portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and tapestry cartoons for the royal palace. Check out the painting “Charles IV of Spain and His Family,” which is a painting I am typing words about.
You’re right, that’s boring, so let’s add some sex appeal. One of Goya’s most famous paintings is “La Maja Desnuda” (The Naked Maja), a painting described as “the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art.” It’s provocative! It gets the people going! It’s also usually displayed at the Prado with “La Maja Vestida” (The Clothed Maja), shown below.
There’s speculation that “La Maja Desnuda” and “La Maja Vestida” depict the Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya had a complicated and possibly romantic relationship. Goya did other paintings where she is indicated as the subject, including “The Black Duchess.” In that one, she points to the ground where the words “Solo Goya” (“Only Goya”) are written.
But Goya did more than paint royals and babes. He witnessed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the resultant Peninsular War (1807 to 1814), which led to a phase of powerful anti-war art. One to know is “The Third of May 1808,” considered one of the first paintings of the modern era.2
Then he got weird. Goya retreated from public life and lived in a farmhouse outside Madrid. There, he did “The Black Paintings,” a series of fourteen paintings done directly on the walls of his home. One of them, “Saturn Devouring One of His Children,” is below, and it’s…well, different.
Goya’s final act saw him leave Spain for Bordeaux. There, he embraced the relatively new medium of lithography and used it for a series called “The Bulls of Bordeaux.” Alongside those prints, he painted “Milkmaid of Bordeaux,” which is proto-Impressionistic and definitely doesn’t have anyone eating anyone else.
I sometimes mix Goya up with other contemporaneous and/or Spanish artists, so here’s a cheat sheet to help you not make that kind of mistake:
Odds and Ends
A film maudit (literally “cursed film”) is a film that most people dislike but that a small group of people are wild about…“with a high-vis vest and a clipboard, you can get almost anywhere”…Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Fiona Dourif, and Dimple Kapadia play Tenet agents; some people know those actors3…the Protagonist mentions “Feynman and Wheeler’s notion that a positron is an electron moving backwards in time,” which I can’t help you with…Spain’s version of the Oscar is called the Goya…Robert Pattinson didn’t understand the plot of Tenet at all…Tenet is its own sequel…the villain quotes T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” when he says “the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”…if you read this post backwards, it’ll be really confusing.
BlacKkKlansman lost to Green Book (2018). Green Book is a race-flipped version of Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture the year Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do the Right Thing came out. Spike Lee once quipped, “every time somebody’s driving somebody, I lose.”
It’s directly echoed in other works, including Manet’s “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian,” Picasso’s “Guernica” and Yue Minjun’s “Execution.”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson was Quicksilver in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Fiona Dourif was the lead in the Child’s Play films and is currently on “The Pitt,” a show people like. Dimple Kapadia’s a huge Indian movie star that I’m not qualified to talk about.
Fiona Dourif didn't just star in the 6th and 7th (pre-reboot) Child's Play films -- she's the daughter of Brad Dourif, the Oscar-nominated actor who voiced Chucky in all 7 installments of the pre-reboot series.