The Pretentionist

Rating: 1/10 (8 September 2006)

My friend Rob asked me to tell him about the film The Illusionist. I answered that I was quite impressed by the way those Viennese spoke perfect English throughout the whole movie. He concurred with my frustration: "Plausibility is a major problem for me with a lot of movies." Obviously not every movie requires plausibility to work, but The Illusionist, wants us to take it far too seriously to allow such suspension of disbelief.
Set in the last decades of the splintering Austro-Hungarian Empire, this film tells the story of Eisenheim, a talented magician who is in love with his childhood friend Sophie, destined to become by marriage Kronprinzessin über Österreich-Ungarn. (I used more High German in that last sentence than any character during the two hours of the film.) Actually, they were in love since childhood, but her parents objected, being as she was an aristocrat in love with a peasant.
Sound familiar? One thinks of The Princess Bride, The Notebook, Titanic, or any other tale of forbidden cross-class love. One would think we got the point by now. But The Princess Bride had a sort of romantic wholesomeness about it, The Notebook had provincial New World charm and a nice twist and even Titanic at least boasted a fun setting and a host of impressive visual effects. The Illusionist tries to emulate some of that but fails miserably. If the story of Titanic was wanting in believability, the very setting of The Illusionist is mentally insulting. The costumes are good and the special effects are fun but there is no flashy cinematography showing off the splendor of the Empire.
Indeed, one would scarcely be aware that this is Imperial Austria we are dealing with if it weren't for the subplot of Kronprinz Leopoldan abusive alcoholic woman-beaterhatching a plot to overthrow his father with the help of his fiancée. (Regarding the writers' treatment of this man, enough has been said by other and better reviewers such as Erik Gloor. I shall let the dry disconnect of my style speak for itself.) Leopold grows to hate Eisenheim one night after the magician gives him a spin of anxiety during a magic trick and his animosity is, needless to say, not helped by the discovery that his fiancée is sleeping with the man. Then when Sophie attempts to leave him, we see her riding out of his country estate on a horse limp and blood-stained. At this point we began to wonder if perhaps the writers did have some spunkthey actually killed the girl, and with a whole hour left! Alas, it is not to be.
There is a rather sketchy anti-monarchical undertone about this movie, difficult to articulate due to its incoherence, but we can be sure it's there. Some readers will take objection to my criticism on the grounds that this was not the main theme of the movie, which is true, but the creators took that theme far enough to warrant critical examination of their treatment. As in Titanic and The Notebook, we are supposed to be outraged because the aristocratic classes possess a sort of unwarranted snobbery acting as the main obstacle to our protagonists' heartfelt ambitions (yawn), but while those films simply played off the concept of class segregation, The Illusionist actually makes statements against aristocracy but at best halfhearted attempts at continuity and consistency from layer to layer. When the magician attempts to prove that Leopold murdered his lover and is a traitor to his father, the chief of police advises him that he "cannot bring down the monarchy." (By exposing a traitor to the crown? Maybe there's some sort of irony here, but to me it's plain stupid.)
It gets worse. When the magician's tricks turn to apparent divination, the humanists hail the end to this horrible period of scientific rationalism and the ushering in of a new "spiritual republic" to replace the old empirethe writers assuming, quite rightly, that an American audience would miss the ironic stupidity. (Rationalism and materialism likened to a Catholic monarchy? I doubt it.) And then they subsequently undermine their repudiation of monarchy when Eisenheim later advises his loyal followers that his spectacles are indeed mere tricks and not truly spiritual experiences, which should impart upon us that it would be wrong to follow the spiritual path to the enlightened republic. So what was the point of showing the humanists' lightweight oration? Putting the story in context clearly went out the window long ago.
But they don't stop there. At the end it becomes clear how much they take our gullibility for granted. The Kronprinz, his conspiracy exposed by his man-in-arms the Chief of Police and standing accused of murder, shoots himself. Then the Chief realizes via a hint that the death of Sophie wassurprise!yet another illusion on the part of the great Eisenheim! And we finish with our magician riding off to the countryside, where his loverregrettably, very much not deadhas traded the tasteful gowns she ported throughout the movie for a nice pair of riding pants. Women's liberation! Freedom and democracy! Down with Danubian tyranny! What exactly is the message here? That the virtues of liberation can be attained by deliberately implicating a man in a crime that never took place? Why should we desire to attain such liberation? More fundamentally, why should we have any sympathy with these most disingenuous protagonists?
What we have here is a hypocritically moralizing tome set against an Anglophone Habsburg Empire. The stage entertainment is amusing, but you're definitely better off investing in tickets to an actual magic show. The real illusion in The Illusionist stems not from the magic tricks, but from the fact that, like Titanic, it looks historical and classy and so dupes its audience into believing they are taking part in something highly culturedonly in this case, there is no effective recapturing even in part of either history or class. It's so pretentious and implausible that even its pretension strains plausibility.