Dim-witted plot and 2-dimensional characters doom potentially decent film

Rating: 3/10 (24 August 2006)

A lush vision of turn-of-the century Vienna.
An occasionally haunting parable of love and loss full of imagery that tugs on your subconscious.
A dreamy, antique world of baroque architecture and ornate dress.
The 'Illusionist' is all these things.
So why doesn't it work? It's plot is dumb as a snake and its characters are as flat as paper dolls.
Whenever you see a period piece in which the protagonists act as though they've traveled to the age in question from our own to do battle with persons more defined by their times, it's hardly ever that hard to figure out who'll come out on top. See 'Titanic' for a textbook example (A notable exception is 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'). Hmm? Who'll win out? The young hipster who looks like he just stepped out of a Starbucks on his way to wardrobe? Or will it be the rich bastard with the slicked-back hair and the less progressive view of women?
In the present film we meet Eisenheim the illusionist, played flatly by Edward Norton, who is haunted by a childhood romance forbidden by class. He's a poor lout with a passion for card tricks. She's a duchess or something.
He runs off and becomes a guy who entertains people with feats of illusion so eye-popping, he'd have to be more than mere mortal to perform them.
His popularity grows and the emperor's son, Prince Leopold, comes to see the show and brings his girlfriend who turns out to be, you guessed it, Eisenheim's long-lost childhood sweety-pie, Sophie. Sophie, played forgettably by Jessica Biel, is pretty, earnest, and has a set of really nice lips. You know, the kind of chick dudes in the movies line up to risk their whole lives for.
Apparently having aged at two thirds the rate of Eisenheim, Sophie comes up on stage to help out in a trick only Jesus Christ himself could have pulled off. They recognize each other and later decide to try and be together.
But the prince, played handily by Rufus Sewell, is none too pleased. Not only has he got his heart set on keeping Sophie around, but she plays an integral role in his plot to overthrow his dad and assume the throne. What's more, the prince is threatened by Eisenheim's amazing tricks and wants to upstage him.
Nice set-up. Too bad the rest of the story relies on fairy-tale logic to proceed, but real-world logic to endear itself. I don't know much about magic, granted. But I do know that at the dawn of the 20th century, just as today, there is no way to conjure the ghostly form of a chubby little boy out of nowhere, have it toddle up to a stage in various levels of opacity, PASSING THROUGH someone's outreached hand in the process -- revealing it to have the consistency of a slightly gelatinous cloud (like all ghosts in the movies these days) -- and then have it stand triumphant on the stage.
David Copperfield eat your heart out.
And hey, whatever. Fairy-tales are often far more compellingly real than those that abide the laws of physics. Just make up your mind for cripes sake! If the ending relies on good old-fashioned science and cleverness PUT us in a universe in which these things hold sway.
Don't try and have it both ways.
But this sloppy universe isn't what dooms the film.
Like its effects, its plot is laughably implausible when it's not mind-numbingly predictable.
And its characters evince the emotional range of perhaps Punch and/or Judy. Eisenheim is morally perfect and professionally super-human. Sophie is the standard damsel-in-distress. And the prince is a mustache-twirling caricature of a bad-guy. All he doesn't do is tie Sophie to the train-tracks.
*** MAJOR SPOILER, next paragraph only ***
And sure, young lovers should be together but a real careful look at the plot-points reveals two people who fool some cat into thinking he's murdered his girlfriend, get the cops to believe it, and then stand silently by when said cat decides to blow his brains out over it. And sure, the cat is a power-drunk miscreant who MIGHT have killed his girlfriend if she hadn't micked him first and would PROBABLY have overthrown the emperor. But he's a square-jawed, alpha-male bossy dude and is presumed guilty by virtue of his appearance in a modern American film. The ending was twisty, but a real twist would have been for the prince to reveal himself as something deeper than the tin-horn dictator he is portrayed as throughout. Maybe he woos her back from the itinerant entertainer. Now THAT would have been original.
In the end, you've got a pretty standard love triangle/David vs. Goliath story wrapped in a slightly new brand of snazzy effects and really thick atmosphere.
Take your 13-year-old daughter to see this one, but man, bring your i-Pod.
This movie review by Erik Gloor