The Prestige

Christopher Nolan's new period thriller The Prestige centers around a magic trick called The Transported Man. The soft-spoken but brilliant illusionist Alfred Boden (Christian Bale) steps into a closet on one side of a stage and instantly reappears in a second clsoet several yards away.

How is this accomplished? Illusion expert Cutter (Michael Caine), who designs such tricks for other performers, suggests the use of a double. His chief protege, Boden's rival Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman), isn't so sure.

Angier's curiosity about The Transported Man develops into an obsession, fueled both by his professional ambition and his personal contempt for Boden, whom Angier blames for the death of his wife (Piper Perabo) during a failed escape act. That the secret turns out to be glaringly obvious, I suppose, is the point. What makes these tricks entertaining aren't the feats of engineering that make them physically possible but the showmanship of the illusionist.

In fact, all of the magic tricks demonstrated in the film, with one notable exception, have relatively straight-forward explanations. The bird cage disappears because it's collapsable. The locked water tank has a trick panel. Therefore, it stands to reason that the film's secrets and explanations would also be simplistic. Like a magician, Nolan informs the viewer from the start that he plans to fool you, then he sets up a seemingly impossible situation that defies explanation.

Unfortunately, this synchronicity doesn't make The Prestige any more entertaining. Though wildly imaginitive and handsomely produced, the film is nevertheless a disappointment, a worthwhile effort undone by an obvious conclusion and a severe, solemn demeanor that's ultimately confining.



Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's script is based on a novel by Christopher Priest that I can only assume must be convoluted and broad. Simultaneously, we see two narratives, set years apart, unfold.

Angier has died while performing his own version of The Transported Man, and Boden has been sentenced to death for his enemy's murder. Whiel in prison, he must decide whether or not to sell his secrets to a wealthy enthusiast in exchange for his daughter's safety and well-being.

While awaiting his execution, Boden reads his alleged victim's diary. In Angier'sjournal, the dead illusionist discusses his obsession with Boden's trick and a search for answers that eventually leads him to Colorado Springs and the laboratory of Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). Of course, Angier only figured out the Colorado connection because his lovely assistant (Scarlett Johansson) previously stole Boden's diary.

So the whole movie consists of these two men reading one another's private journal. It's an elegant structure that allows Nolan to explore a few key questions about the conceptualization of "magic tricks," their significance and their practice, and also the competitive drive that leads to these sorts of rivalries.

Cutter explains the three "acts" inherent in every magic trick during a monologue at the film's outset. First comes "The Pledge," in which the magician shows the audience a normal object and offers it for scrutiny. Then comes "The Turn," when the magician makes that ordinary object do something extraordinary. Finally comes "The Prestige," which Cutter tells us is the part of the trick in which you see something you've never seen before.

But of course, that's not all that happens at the end of a magic trick. We don't just see something magical. We see the moment of magic decisively end and the circumstances return to normal. The woman isn't sewn in half...She gets out of the box and stands up, to demonstrate that she's no worse for wear. The rabbit doesn't just disappear...It pops back out of the hat.

Algier says that he performs magic to see the looks of shock and pleasure cross the faces of his audience. He eventually figures out how to replicate (but not how to explain) Boden's act using a lookalike, but his solution leaves him below the stage when the audience applauds for his talentless double. This simply won't do - The Prestige must allow him to face his audience and receive his fanfare.

Naturally, there's an egotism to this, Algier's intense need for approval and praise, but Nolan seems to insist that a self-aggrandizement and egotism are necessary preconditions for a successful magician. The magic act is not just a physical illusion - allowing materials to take on properties they should not naturally possess - but an illusion of control. Algier is pretending to manipulate reality to suit his own needs, as if he has the power to flip a switch and turn reality off and then back on again.

It's a God-like power, to remove and reapply the conditions for life on Earth, that becomes momentarily invested in a man. Thus, he gives the humans in his audience the brief, fleeting feeling of having power over their environment and circumstances themselves. For a moment, they are free to physical constraints, seeing a person defy the laws of the universe through feats of wonder and amazement.

Later, when Algier goes to meet Tesla and ask for the inventor's help in understanding Boden's illusion, Nolan conflates this idea with the notion of scientific inquiry. The magician and the scientist have the same ends but come at them from opposite perspectives. The scientist, displeased with our present understanding of the universe, completes experiments and develops hypothesis to explain the unknown. The magician, displeased with our present understanding of the universe, prepares illusions and develops trickery to create deeper and more universal unknowns.

Both Tesla and Algier ultimately seek to sidestep the laws of nature. One does so by illuminating and the other by obscuring, but the ultimate irony in a film filled with ironies comes when we realize that the end results of both tactics are near identical.

Collaborating again with Batman Begins cinematographer Wally Pfitzer, Nolan has once more created a haunting, moody urban landscape of soft light and deep shadow. The Prestige renders the London of the late 19th century with exquisite, if austere, taste - all milky-white fog on dark black cloaks. The scenes in Colorado Springs, set in and around Tesla's electrified mountain compound, recall the training sequences from Nolan's Batman but with apocalyptic undertones. Rather than scaling a mountain in order to face fears from the past, Algier ascends to Tesla's laboratory to witness the uncertain birth of the future, the day that the impossible becomes the commonplace.



Bowie's brilliant in these scenes, not only giving Tesla a subtly realistic accent but depicting the raging fire of the man's obsession more vividly than either of the two main actors. Don't get me wrong, Bale acquits himself well. As he did with Bruce Wayne (the two roles are occasionally similar), Bale provides Boden with a burdensome intellect hidden behind a shy, timid demeanor. He speaks less and knows more than anyone else in the film, and he genuinely seems to suffer from his inability to share the nuances of his genius with the world. Alas, his career as a magician depends upon an unwillingness, under any circumstances, to share his secrets. The idea being, I guess, that once an audience knows how a trick is performed, they no longer have any use for the individual who actually pulled it off.

Michael Caine, as always, does nice work, but he's stuck in the film's most thankless, expository role. Johansson, who for some reason can't keep up her British accent for more than a few words at a time, fails to make an impression at all beyond looking good in an old-fashioned boustier.

Jackman is fine, although he felt a bit out of depth in the role at times. It's his anger over his wife's death and his devotion to the Transported Man that drive the entire film's action, but he occasionally seemed whiny and petulant rather than passionate or intensely driven. I feel bad for saying this, because I like the guy and he's pretty good in this film, but he doesn't really project the gravitas or authority of Christian Bale, Michael Caine or especially Bowie's Tesla. It's hard watching Jackman in those scenes because his Angier just doesn't seem to belong. He's the preening staged phony in a world of authentic wizards, not the serious contender for Top Magic Gun.

My biggest misgiving about the film, though, isn't the Jackman performance but the overly-tidy conclusion. We get a few new pieces of information right near the end but they're both blatantly telescoped more than once during the film's opening hour. One plot twist, the explanation for Boden's version of The Transported Man illusion, actually seemed to anger some in the theater where I viewed the film earlier today. Nolan repeatedly includes clues in both the dialogue and the camera work that just give this secret away too early and too forcefully. (I suspected it might be misdirection while watching the movie..."Maybe this is all part of the trick, and I'm supposed to think it's going to end this way...The ending couldn't really be that blatantly obvious, could it?" Alas, it was.)

The second twist, the explanation for Angier's version of the same trick, seems to violate the central idea behind the movie. A film that has been plotted so gracefully for 2 hours gets a bit sloppy, conceptually. That I could forgive. After all, it's a film about magic - the whole point is to render the impossible possible. But though it creates an interesting paradox, this conclusion seemed excessively cruel. In a Being John Malkovich-style bit of ambiguity, one character is led to distrust the very nature of his own existance. The "trick" has overwhelmed his life, leaving him a perplexed and uncertain shadow of his former self.

For a film that's dour throughout, that's still a murky and downbeat way to finish. My biggest knock on Nolan as a filmmaker might be his total and complete lack of anything resembling a sense of humor. He's exceptionally talented but his films are also kind of suffocating. A total lack of levity after a while begins to feel (to me, anyway) like a lack of humanity.

That's doubly surprising when you consider that The Prestige is really several love stories intertwined. Boden and Algier, of course, devote the better part of their lives and careers on topping and outwitting one another. A serious, long-term rivalry indicates at least a committed level of concern with another individual's behavior and abilities.

Both men also fall in love for Johansson's buxom magician's assistant Olivia. Also, let's not forget that Algier had a beloved dead wife and Boden has a beloved living one (Rebecca Hall). Likewise, Nolan explores the passionate love these men share for their work. Tesla is willing to sacrifice not only his life and that of his assistant Alley (Andy Serkis, finally playing a human in a movie) on his electrical experiments, but his honor and reputation as well. Boden's wife insists that he loves magic more than he loves her, and some days he even agrees with her. And there's the love of Boden for his daughter, that drives him to divulge even his darkest, most treasured secret.

In a film with this many intense relationships and love affairs, in this kind of a fascinating historical setting, and with this level of actors, the movie should be more lively. More gripping. More elaborate. Even...more fun?

In purely technical terms, The Prestige represents some of Nolan's finest work. There are some truly remarkable, inspired sequences, in particular those surrounding Tesla's experiments. It's probably one of the best-looking films of the year. But, like Sam Mendes' similarly well-shot Road to Perdition, I'd have a hard time recommending it to most people because it's just kind of sealed off and cold, impressive but not awesome.