Hapsburg High School

Rating: 7/10 (2 October 2006)

Very enjoyable for what it set out to be; well played, beautifully shot, and with a plot that hustles you over the soft spots and makes it easy to suspend disbelief. It could have been so much better with a few minor tweaks.
Chief Inspector Uhl is the one thoroughly adult character, a man who thinks he is worldly wise because he has managed to get the most he can out of the system. Thanks to historical hindsight, we know he's not as shrewd as he thinks because he doesn't realize the system is doomed. All the other characters are from a teenage romantic comedy, even though they're in their late 20s or early 30s. Eisenheim/Abromowitz projects the burning resentment of a smart, talented guy who is told he'll never get what he deserves, including the girl of his dreams, because he isn't one of the right people. Duchess/Cheerleader Sophie is something of a blank slate; we don't have enough back story to understand what would make an aristocrat like her break out of her upbringing by even seeing the son of a (Jewish) cabinetmaker as an interesting human being. We just have to accept the nerd's fantasy that she'd be dazzled by his sheer talent and fall in love with him. Crown Prince Leopold is simply a stock character, the villainous macho jerk from a hundred teenage romantic comedies. In this triangle, class and sex appear to have the same relations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as they do at John Hughes High, and The Illusionist is enjoyable as an elegant retelling of that old familiar plot.
---SPOILERS BELOW ---
It would have been a stronger movie if Leopold had been a less one-sided character. Take away the spiteful nastiness and make the Prince an intelligent, ambitious, aggressive man who can see that the empire he has inherited is collapsing and is desperate to make the thing work. Keep both Eisenheim's hatred of a society that has unjustly denied him his heart's desire and his need to destroy the man who symbolizes that society in order to get the happiness he deserves. Leave everything else in place. Instead of a mere happy ending, you get deeper overtones of tragedy.
It would also have been a stronger movie if the last scene had been left on the cutting room floor. Let Uhl figure out the illusion, only too late, but leave the audience guessing whether he was right or not.
Finally, there was one major logical flaw in the illusion of Sophie's death. She belongs to a prominent, powerful family who are Leopold's political allies. Even if she had the cooperation of the family doctor to bluff Uhl and the police out of examining her apparent corpse (and we don't know how she and Eisenheim got his help), how were her relatives tricked? In particular, what did the lover/conspirators do about the very public funeral the Duchess von Teschen would have received?