This is one of those heavily plotted puzzle movies where writing about without revealing spoilers is like walking across a room littered with mousetraps, so I'll attempt to be brief. Plot-wise, it's about two magicians who start out friends and become deadly serious rivals. Structure-wise it careens forwards, backwards and almost sideways in time, like Memento with dyslexia. Thematically, and here's where I think the movie earns its stripes even though it's not getting credit for it, there's a very deep, unequivocal position on the cost of performance -- a cost of self-obliteration.
It's easy to belittle a movie that's so fetishistic of its plot, but even though I was often confused on chronology, I found myself grateful to Nolan and his brother Jonathan, the co-screenwriter from a novel by Christopher Priest, for respecting my intelligence enough to keep my mind active throughout the picture in their own elegant and entertaining manner. While The Prestige opened at #1, it's done a mediocre box office since then, as young audience today seem to categorically reject period pieces (even as recent period as The Lords of Dogtown) and then the plot might make too many heads spin.
Clearly Touchstone and Warner Bros., who appear to have co-financed the relatively modestly budgeted movie, were doing it to please the tremendously talented director of Batman Begins and another Bat-buster to come, but that's as it should be. Nolan is serving his own passion and said he wanted to get back to his earlier independent film feel, shooting most of it handheld and as his own camera operator. In the transition for 21st Century Gotham to Victorian England the fact that he's followed up his success with Christian Bale as The Dark Knight by collaborating immediately again with Bale as the magician Borden, and Bale to my mind knocks it out of the park. Equally hard-working is Hugh Jackman as magician Ancier, and while it's enjoyable to see this as a feature-length battle between two of the greatest comic book heroes of our time, Batman vs. Wolverine, both actors are subsumed by their new characters and keep us in the movie the whole way.
The rest of the cast is excellent, particularly Michael Caine (the other Batman Begins repeater) anchoring the period and London, Rebecca Hall as Borden's kind and eventually suffering wife, David Bowie in a way-too-gratifying cameo as Thomas Edison rival Nikolas Tesla, and the always brilliant, always protean Andy Serkis, should you recognize him without his Gollum on. While one is inclined to point out Scarlet Johansson as perhaps a weak link, with a serviceable but clearly studied accent and glamorous looks, she proves herself perfectly game and, as always (I am compelled to report), easy on the eyes.
Here's the meat of it: the movie certainly covers the cost of such focused hatred, the cost of obsessive rivalry. It has something to say about illusion, how much we want of it, how much we want it revealed, and what the revelation means -- does it demystify to the point of ordinariness, or blow us away with the force of learning that what we have taken for granted we have gotten 180 degrees wrong?
But, as mentioned above, it is the cost of performance, of the truly committed kinds, that haunts after the credits roll. In the production photos Nolan looks doughier and sallower than he did before his whirlwind Hollywood sojourn into feverish big budget production, and I'll bet the resonance for him is squarely on the price of being a renown entertainer, a rival for the top-spot illusionist.
What drives the performer, the entertainer? And who wins but the most committed? You change your name, you shuck your old friends, you put yourself through unending physical tests and existential risks in order to -- what? -- have bragging rights to being the audience favorite, perhaps? To earn that wild esteem, that ephemeral applause, it can cost your very identity and, it seems almost obvious when you think about it, why shouldn't it?
From the opening moments where Michael Caine narrates the three steps in any successful magic trick -- The Pledge, The Turn, The Prestige -- the notion of The Return permeates the movie. We wait for it at the end of any magic trick, never imagining the cost of that return, hidden skillfully by the conjurer. The Prestige not only pulls back that curtain but it does something bigger. By linking the cost of performance to the cost of return, it reminds us that life is indeed finite.
While the temporal structure of the movie may resemble a Möbius Strip and the notion of return may imply immortality -- as does the type of fame these two rivals seek with a vengeance -- the film is most challenging, most courageous, as a rebuke to that notion.
Do what you may in life, but there is ultimately no return, no matter how hard and relentlessly one may hammer at the limits. To rail against our common fate is as futile as, say, pounding powerlessly at the glass walls of a water tank while locked inside, drowning.
2 comments:
The Q is, should I go see it?
Devoted Reader in Delmar
The answer is, Y.
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