Overall Rating
  Awesome: 54.55%
Worth A Look: 27.27%
Average: 12.73%
Pretty Bad: 0.91%
Total Crap: 4.55%
5 reviews, 80 user ratings
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| Prestige, The |
by Erik Childress
"Why Does Christopher Nolan Insist On Making The Best Movies?"
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A magic trick is a relatively simplistic device when you think about it. The execution we’re talking about, not the years of studying and practicing the craft. Even as a child the basic framework of watching a magician remains intact. You wait in anticipation, full well that something is going to disappear or reappear. Watching closely you try to outwit the foil who has two steps ahead of you since he walked in the door. Then when all is over, you applaud and inevitably the first words out of your mouth are “how did they do that?” The revelation of such tricks made for some interesting “wizard’s curtain” television last decade, making the same ol’ dog’s eyes weary enough to guess the color of the wool well before it was pulled over them. Much like years of plot twists and surprise endings can jade a moviegoer into dismissing build-ups filmmakers trot out as if we’ve never seen a magic show before. Christopher Nolan is an exception though. As one of the premier directors in their infancy, Nolan has used the same illusionist’s ruses to craft an entertainment whose power lies not behind the curtain but right in front of all the types of magic imaginable.“Are you watching closely,” is both the statement and sage advice offered to us at film’s beginning. Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) is performing his signature trick to an audience of eager spectators just before the turn of the 19th century. A large machine fills the stage and is inspected for authenticity by a member of the audience who backstage rips off his disguise and announces to a clueless stagehand that he’s part of the show. This man is Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and as lightning bolts fill the stage and a trap door is revealed, he watches as Angier drowns in his own water tank, mysteriously left just below his escape. Borden is sentenced to death for the crime and a larger story is upon us.
Years ago, Angier & Borden were stagehands (and audience ringers) for a second-rate magician where Angier’s wife (Piper Perabo) works as the pretty assistant, one of the best forms of misdirection. Cutter (Michael Caine) is the contrapment designer who has seen it all and tries to get through the head of Borden, who has dreams of wowing audiences with even greater spectacles, that the trick is only half the battle. Showmanship and selling it is the other. Disaster strikes the show one evening when the water tank takes the life of Angier’s beloved. He blames Borden for the incident, who claims ignorance in the knot that he tied. This will begin a game of one-upmanship over the years, sabotaging each other’s shows and potentially their lives as both try to discover the world’s ultimate bit of magic.
Detailing the remainder of the plot would take, at least, another six paragraphs and rob you of the captivating turns that Nolan and his brother Jonathan (both responsible for the screenplay for Memento) develop from Christopher Priest’s novel. And I use the word “turn” instead of “twist” because that’s precisely how they handle each scene, with just a delicate shift into territory that involves ideas instead of overt revelations meant to shock us. It’s opening shot of a field littered with discarded top hats first registers as a metaphor for a changing of the guard, where the ingenuity of the 20th century begins to leave man in the dust – but later becomes a decidedly more ominous eye-opener in the obsessions of those hoping to be visionaries in their own time.
One of these men-of-vision turns out to be famed inventor, Nikola Tesla (played without a hint of distraction by David Bowie), known for his contributions to electricity in the wake of some other guy named Thomas Edison. Angier seeks him out, aided by Borden’s cryptic journal, to help him advance his signature slight-of-cornea known as The Transported Man (just one of two nods to the films of David Cronenberg.) Tesla’s representation of science is both a progression and the destruction of the magical uncertainties which make up life’s mysteries. Electricity may have been a magic trick centuries earlier, but it is now a reality. We choose what to believe with our eyes and what to doubt with our minds and while there’s not a single mention of God or religion throughout The Prestige, it’s presence is in every passing scene.
Getting their hands dirty is the occupational hazard that magicians are forced to face, even when they must convince themselves that they are clean. It’s manifested in the sacrifice each must place on their own lives to craft the illusion as reality for the audience. Is it real or is it Memorex? Is that the same bird that was in the cage? Was Jesus resurrected or did someone just hide his body? The way the Nolans subtly pieces all this together is flawless as he becomes the magician we must be paying the greatest attention to. His separate storylines jump back and forth through time utilizing the ingenious device of Angier & Borden reading each other’s diaries and little hints like Angier’s limp and Borden’s mysterious mute assistant to effortlessly keep our eye on the rubber ball while his bag holds something much more powerful.
Over the next three months, we get to see Christian Bale in not just this but as the unhinged ex-soldier in Harsh Times and the captured POW in Rescue Dawn. If it hasn’t dawned upon you already with his brilliant work in American Psycho, The Machinist or Batman Begins, then this trio of performances should cement him as one of the (if not the best) actor of his generation. Anything less is insulting. In turn, Hugh Jackman (who has already lost Famke Janssen, Piper Perabo, and Rachel Weisz to death on screen this year – and Scarlett Johansson TWICE including here, but that was his own fault) remains a presence as a leading man and does some of his best work here. But the real leading man here is Christopher Nolan, whose last three films have all found a spot on my top ten list in 2001, 2002 & 2005. While we eagerly await for The Dark Knight to appear in 2008, the only question about The Prestige’s placement on 2006’s best list is how high can it go.Christopher Nolan has been exploring the dual nature of man throughout his brief, but so far extraordinary resume. In Memento, it was Guy Pierce whose struggle with short-term memory loss revealed the capability of a more frightening identity. Al Pacino and Robin Williams were two sides of the same coin in Insomnia where the cop unwittingly becomes the criminal and his prey flirted on the side of righteousness; convinced his crime was no worse. And in Batman Begins, the hero needs no further explanation here as Nolan gave us the greatest justice of all with the finest treatment of his story imaginable. With The Prestige though, Nolan has taken this aspect to new realms. Algier, convinced that Borden’s version of The Transported Man involves no doppelganger trickery, goes out and finds his own double (a drunken actor also played perfectly by Jackman). It’s more than a case of just parlor tricks though, since Nolan is merely using it as a springboard to expose duality in all forms, physical and mental, towards each man’s self and the treatment of the women they profess to have feelings for; love being the trickiest manifestation of them all. And just as these details come to light, like a perfect magician’s audience, we anticipate their path towards the knowledge we have been provided with only to have the rug inched out from under us time and time again.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15266&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/20/06 14:45:58
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USA
20-Oct-2006 (PG-13)
DVD: 20-Feb-2007
UK
10-Nov-2006
Australia
16-Nov-2006
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