The Prestige

Obsession is a powerful thing. Everyone knows what infatuation feels like. Everyone knows that feeling of fascination with something. Most likely a majority of people would say that they know what it’s like to be obsessed with something in the real meaning of the word. I’m a skeptic at heart; I say that an actual serious obsession is not a common thing. It is for this reason that watching someone obsess over something is so interesting to me and I think to other viewers as well.
This sort of situation is only one of the many things audiences can feast their eyes upon as they view The Prestige. Director Christopher Nolan knows that every movie must have a purpose, and with The Prestige his purpose is the same one that the two main characters share. His purpose is illusion. Nolan tantalizes the audience with all sorts of information, sights, sounds, puzzles, and answers. Finally, after a cinematic web that only the director of Memento could weave, he concludes with a final twist and a last haunting frame before the fade to black.
There’s no way to address this movie without first exclaiming on the excellence of cast. Hugh Jackman, as Robert Angier, and Christian Bale, as Alfred Borden, set aside their onscreen personae of super heroes to embody two turn-of-the-century magicians who begin as coworkers but end up bitter enemies driven by their obsessions with outsmarting the other.
Then there’s Michael Caine, back to prove once again why he is nothing less than a screen legend, as if he actually has anything to prove. Like his role as Alfred in Nolan’s Batman Begins, Caine plays a wise man offering direction to the younger less experienced protagonist. This time around, he’s got a character separate from either protagonist while still being involved in their interactions and endeavors.
Scarlett Johansson must not be ignored in this film. Indeed as an actress she refuses to be ignored in any role she takes on. First she is the demure young assistant of Angier, but at his request she goes to work as an assistant to Borden in order to steal his secrets. As a tool in their plotting to outdo each other Johansson’s Olivia has the choice of which one she will help and which one she will deceive. I hope she knows because most of the time we don’t.
The story is not as twisted as Nolan’s Memento, neither is it as strictly linear as his less than impressive Batman Begins. It is a better film than either of these because it is balanced. Not only is the plot perfectly between boring and baffling; the scale is both one of marvelous grandeur and one of intimate character study.
The cinematography is quite impressive, especially during the magician’s feats of illusion when we the audience are allowed to see things from the perspective of the performer and the onlookers.
The tone and colors are also used effectively to portray the minds of the characters and the sense that behind every bright and exciting trick there is a darker truth not to be seen or known by the everyday observer.
The film as a whole is a magician’s show. Things happen that confuse or amaze us but we keep watching because we know, or at least hope, that they will be explained in before the lights go up. Christopher Nolan, like all good magicians, knows that he can’t give it all away or the illusion is gone. Not everything in this movie has an answer. The important thing is that everything we need to know is told. We can try to fill in the gaps with explanations that make sense to us. Or maybe with explanations that don’t make as much sense. But before we try to hammer out every mystery in the movie we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to? No, we like the illusion, it’s what we came to see, and in The Prestige it’s delivered to us with the same flare and showmanship of those dazzling magicians who’s obsession, above all things, was the captivation of an audience.

A-