The Prestige

Magic explained is always inherently disappointing. Beautiful, profound “effects” invariably involve confederates in the audience, mechanical apparatus, trapdoors, smoke and mirrors and other sordid technology. “The Prestige” is a 2006 film directed (and written) by Christopher Nolan involving a duel to the death between two magicians. To say that the film is confusing is an understatement. The adversary magicians are played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale and, in their tophats and tails, they seem fraternal, indeed, almost doubles of one another, particularly since both tend to speak in hushed portentous whispers, move the same way, and have similarly pretty assistants and wives -- indeed, for a time, the two men share a mistress, the comely and nubile Scarlett Johansson. It is a debilitating chore for the viewer to keep the two sinister-looking blokes separate in your mind, particularly since they often go about in disguise, and generally act the same way and have identical motivations (to thwart one another) and this competition involves lurking in the audience, getting selected to participate on-stage in a trick and, then, confounding that illusion to calamitous, indeed, mutilating results -- one magicians loses a bunch of fingers and the other has his leg broken so badly that he hobbles about for the balance of the movie. (The film has a disturbing subtext involving self-mutilation -- in this respect the movie is reminiscent of Tod Browning’s macabre thrillers starring Lon Chaney, silent films that often featured similarly murderous show-business rivals.) The two adversaries perform tit-for-tat betrayals, steal one another’s stunts, and, indeed, each other's women and, finally, compete for a trick that seems to involve teleportation. This latter trick turns out to be the shoal on which the film founders. It turns out that Nikolai Tesla, the wizard of electricity, has figured out a way to actually teleport objects, or duplicate them, or, perhaps, to use modern computer diction, to print them in an elaborate, arc-emitting Bride of Frankenstein 3-D printer device. At this stage, the film becomes merely silly and the proliferation of confusing doubles reaches a saturation point. Apparently, the men have duplicated themselves, innumerable times in the case of one of the magicians, and things go completely awry. It’s as if the filmmaker decided that artifice and illusion is insufficient and that actual magic -- teleportation or electrical cloning -- is necessary to drive the plot and make the narrative, which has long since ceased to make any sense, come out right in the end. The film is handsome enough and the first half of the film, most of which involves interesting and elaborate misdirections and stage machinery is amusing enough in a hokey sort of way. The second half of the movie, more dire and involving the sepulchral presence of David Bowie, imitating the Yugoslavian genius, Tesla, is foolish -- once we figure out that anything is allowed and that the movie will, in fact, rely on real magic and not illusion, we rapidly lose interest. The acting is monotonous -- the rival magicians sulk and rage at one another but don’t show much in the way of genuine or unique character. Michael Caine is wasted in a role that is largely expository and a number of fine British character actors do yeoman-work. The sets are impressive and the film has a picturesque gas-lit aura, although the murky London streets and the misty mountains and forests of Colorado where Tesla is working are familiar to us from other movies, most particularly the Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey, Jr. The film is reasonably engaging, but told in a complicated flash-back and flash-forward structure that really doesn’t do anything for the viewer but add to the confusion. This is an ambitious picture that doesn’t ever quite work.