The Prestige (2006)

DVD, Somerville, MA

April 07, 2007

** / ****

Clones? Are you kidding me? Clones!?

The Prestige is a film about rival magicians Angier and Borden (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) caught in a dangerous game of illusionary one upsmanship during the end of the 1800s. Bent on perfecting the greatest trick of all-time, “The Transporting Man,” an illusion where a man disappears and then reappears elsewhere in a matter of seconds, the illusionists stop at nothing to assure that their version is the ultimate performance.

The movie is novel in its story telling technique, which is as much bane as boon. Using multiple flashbacks the movie twists and turns adding two layers of intrigue for every one explained until the final reveal exposes the true secret behind both men’s magic. Scenes are out of order and numerous secrets only hinted at throughout. Diary entry vignettes shuffle our attention from the principles and their obsessive rivalry to love interests, bizarre science, and cooky showmanship just as a magician might. But unlike a magician, the film loses focus and all the shuffling quickly causes us to wonder, whose perspective is this anyway? The answer: no ones, and by presenting such a muddled view the film is obviously trying to manipulate us, in a bad way.

As the film progresses and the truth becomes obvious the weight of the puzzle gets overbearing, switching focus almost entirely. The question of how each magician performs “The Transporting Man” is the riddle at stake in The Prestige and everything relies on our satisfaction of its resolution. By having that question muddled and then superseded by notions of self-identity, this terrible tangent forces an unsatisfying conclusion. Sadly, the answer to how these men transport themselves from one point to another so quickly without a double are the most obvious and when revealed a tremendous disappointment. Likewise, discovering you were correct all along and that the rules of magicianship are broken along the way (moving the secret out of the physical realm) is an even tougher egg to swallow and the movie’s ultimate downfall. Think the final reveal in The Village is unfulfilling? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Prestige further suffers from bizarrely comical outbursts by Hugh Jackman’s Angier as well the distracting performance of David Bowie as real-life scientist Nikola Tesla. Jackman’s unintentional comedy seems more the problem of script writing than his acting skill (he is always a reliable performer and excellent in his “other” role in the film) but it still detracts from The Prestige’s overly serious tone. Likewise Bowie as the eccentric scientist is jarring as a man whose entire story seems out of another movie. Introducing science, or in this case science fiction, to a tale about fooling people into believing the unreal is real but still having that secret in the bounds of reality is a cop out and change in genre so unsettling it’s most comparable to riding an amusement park roller coaster on a full stomach.

Don’t get me wrong, The Prestige is a not horrible movie but it is not a very good one either. Like two of Nolan’s other films, Memento and Batman Begins, The Prestige is admirable in that it works hard to skew our movie going experience from that of typical Hollywood. But with the wheels of the scriptwriter heard grinding throughout The Prestige inevitably fizzles by valuing showmanship over the crux of what Hollywood does best: giving us what we want and sticking to the point. Clever trickery can only go so far without a satisfying reveal and The Prestige is all hocus pocus without the abracadabra.