Review

Review Date: 22-October-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Prestige (2006)

As the makers of this picture have tried hard to convey, the prestige is the third act of a magic trick when the magician wraps up an amazing feat and sends the audience home happy. Not surprisingly, then, “The Prestige” is designed to build wonder and tension so it can deliver a satisfying climax. It’s a labyrinth of nonlinear stories involving beautiful people in gothic locales, tortured beautiful people who are riddled with obsession and drawn down the darker halls of life. Spawned from the creators of “Memento,” it has brains and cleverness in spades, but it doesn’t pull off its feat. Its wires are showing, if you will, the mechanics of its tricks creaking and open for observation.

The central character of “The Prestige” is a British magician named Angiers (Hugh Jackman) who is apparently murdered at the beginning by a former associate named Borden (Christian Bale). As the story goes back to trace their history (which unfolds in the late 1800s), we learn that their rivalry began with the death of Angiers’ wife during a magic show and his subsequent fixation on Borden’s complicity. The years leading up to the murder are then recounted in a series of leaps, from Borden reading Angiers’ diary in jail to Angiers reading Borden’s diary on a mission to Colorado, from Borden unveiling the famous Transported Man illusion to Angiers trying desperately to decipher and better the trick.

The mission to Colorado is where the plot starts to go haywire, though at the same it’s a nifty trip. Angiers’ purpose is to locate the wizard scientist Nikola Tesla (a riveting David Bowie, finally showing his age) and extract from him a marvel that will give him ultimate victory. Everything about Tesla’s lab, including his sophisticated Igor (Andy Serkis), is a horror-movie hoot, but it leads to nothing but goofiness. Specifically, it ends with Angiers returning to London with a one-of-a-kind machine which resembles a giant metronome counting down his final days.

Perhaps if “The Prestige” focused on the magicians’ professional lives such flights of fancy would have contributed to a coherent whole. But unlike “The Illusionist,” this year’s earlier mystical-historical tale, this movie supposes a message to its magic. It aims to show how dangerous obsessions can be by mowing down everything in their path. To this end the cast includes Scarlett Johannson (worthy of bigger, better roles) as a stage assistant who becomes intimate with both men, and Rebecca Hall as Borden’s put-upon wife. The women’s ordeals are fairly ridiculous; in fact, Borden’s entire personal life is absurd. Michael Caine is also on hand to provide grounding as a theatrical technician, yet he too serves mainly to explicate the magicians’ failings. The supporting cast’s presence detracts from the real show: the twisted desires of men who exist on the fringes of accepted reality. The prestige of “The Prestige” gets lost in a tangled web of wan emotion and melodrama.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.