A Little Hocus Pocus mit Your Strudel?

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2006)

"The Illusionist" is a fun bit of mitteleuropa fluff. There's lots of pretty sets from the Czech Republic, both architecture and pastoral scenes.
Paul Giamatti as a police officer gives us yet another masterful performance. He was convincing as a drunk in "Sideways," as a boxing manager in "Cinderella Man," and he's convincing here as a Viennese cop from a common background trying to reach the top of society by carrying out the will of the powerful but not destroying a magician for whom he feels some sympathy.
Jessica Biel is really lovely as an aristocrat torn between family duty and true love. Unlike too many other actresses her age, Biel really convinces that she is of another era. There is nothing of the jarringly anachronistic twenty-first century mall rat, valley girl, or post-feminist about her performance. She fills out her lush costumes with both her body and her soul.
Rufus Sewell is so good as the evil Crown Prince Leopold that I wish that there were a slew of Hapsburg movies in the pipe so we could boo and hiss him again and again. Let's make a movie version of "Janosik" or "Good Soldier Svejk" or remake "The Prisoner of Zenda" just to keep Rufus Sewell in that costume, toting that sword, screaming those lines.
Ed Norton has his champions; I don't get it. I think he's fine, of course, but I'm not all gaga about him the way some are. He's good here as a magician / lover / trickster, but he didn't take my breath away.
Philip Glass' score was fun, in places, in that it reflected mitteleuropean music, but there weren't enough over the top moments, and mitteleuropean music is all about going over the top, in terms of technical aspects like tempo and emotional aspects like schmaltz. Also, one wishes that Glass had made use of instruments other than violins and the occasional flute. A cimbolom, for example, a zither, or a Slovak fujara. The score for "The Third Man" has not been bested as the most memorable mitteleuropean-influenced film score.
The story, of Eisenheim, a magician who bests the world around him through his wits, is reminiscent of Jewish folktales in which a very clever Jewish man outwits his better-armed, Gentile opponents. The movie doesn't make much of these cultural resonances.
Also, I wonder about "Eisenheim"'s similarity to "Einstein." In one of his onstage tricks, Eisenheim creates the illusion of an orange tree growing from seed to maturity in a few moments. He introduces this trick by talking about the relativity of time, which, of course, brings Einstein to mind. Again, the movie does not dwell on this.
As much as I liked this movie, I wish it had been richer. The real mitteleuropean world it depicts is a busy, lively, crowded, warm, complex one; I wish some of that had made its way onto the screen. The movie is slow, and not the good kind of slow. Its slowness could have been livened up with more on screen -- why not give Giamatti a peasant lover in embroidered aprons who could provide some depth to scenes that consist, only, of Giamatti staring ahead, looking dumbfounded, as he tries to figure something out? Otherwise, though, "The Illusionist" is a fun and pleasant movie.