Smoke and mirrors, unsexy romance; pretty scenes

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2006)

The Illusionist, NYTimes film critic Stephen Holden says, "rouses your slumbering belief in the miraculous." Maybe. Its grandly staged magic shows in nineteenth-century costume are very pretty. But this fairy tale for adults with its suspenseful but simplistic plot and its feeble finale has you just plain slumbering at times too. To call it "the miraculous" is glorifying what Eisenheim the Illusionist does -- just super-good magic tricks that con naïve nineteenth-century audiences in the age of Mesmer and Liszt. And Eisenheim's tricks are inevitably marred, cinematically, by the fact that he's mostly not doing them but having them done for him on film, processed in by the editors and special effects guys.
Finally Holden also says this finds a good use for Edward Norton's "disturbing inscrutability." Is that what it is, though? Or is it a quality of being technically skilled but cold, mechanical, lacking in presence -- as well as limp in the area of sex appeal? (In fact the movie's sole purveyor of animal attraction is Jessica Biel as Sophie, the noblewoman both the Crown Prince and Eisenheim want. She and Eisenheim were secret teenage sweethearts even though she was an aristocrat and he was a carpenter's son (don't ask). She's sexy, but due to some shortcomings in the acting line she's a bit limp too -- you can't remember anything she says -- but if you look at her lips or her cleavage, that does the much-needed job of giving the screen a pulse.
Actually, though Norton is the Illusionist, and his romance with Ms. Biel, revived when he returns from fifteen years of wandering in the Far East, highly dangerous now that she's semi-betrothed to the Crown Prince, is the movie's plot's main focus, still the movie wouldn't get off the ground if it weren't for the fact that Paul Giamatti has an equally important role as the head cop the Prince sends in to hound Eisenheim's footsteps. And that's not enough either: Rufus Sewall in his scene-chewing performance as the obnoxious Crown Prince gives Norton and Giamatti a very necessary run for their money. Put them all together, though, and despite the fact that this is a romance, you still haven't got a single male hearthrob -- not in these roles.
Paul Giamatti is an impressively skillful mechanical "character" actor -- something that we don't necessarily associate with movie acting, but which movies nonetheless always need. He can deliver any tone or personality, within the limits of his schlubby looks -- which aren't really so confining, given that the world arguably contains more schlubs than Hugh Jackmans. His technical skill and adaptability would mean little if he didn't have that cuddly, slightly goofy but still smart and competent quality that makes his characters believable, sympathetic, and fun to watch. There's always an edge of a twinkle in Paul's face, when he's working well. There's the bustle of the buffoon in him. He's best as an amiable loser, as he is as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and as Miles in Sideways, his best roles to date, not to say immortal ones. Since then he has gone on to bigger and better checks, but not better acting opportunities or as good movies, though his work is always admirable and he brings palpable enthusiasm to his work. He inhabits Herr Uhl, the Viennese chief inspector of police he has to play in The Illusionist, as convincingly as ever, but the man is such a dutiful and serious good-boy-in-school type, that when the laughs come they tend to seem unintentional.
Rufus Sewall, another versatile character actor whose looks give him the embarrassing additional option of being a leading man, is trying so hard to be strange and unpleasant and scary as Crown Prince Leopold, with his big dark over-precise moustache and thin parenthetical made-up looking eyebrows, that his looks in modern terms are so effete as to make him seem "gay." Compare Pascal Greggory as Jean Hervey in Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, a similarly effete character who's so subtly done he becomes complex and tragic. Sewall's Leopold is obtrusive, joining into the magic show at Eisenheim's command performance at court to his own embarrassment; but Leopold's menace in Biel's stiff staging seems a bit theatrical and empty. The worst thing he does on screen (to anybody else, anyway) is smack a lady, despite his wearing a sword and brandishing a pistol. The way he meets his end isn't surprising. Before that he has long turned into a barking stick figure. If only Sewall had been encouraged to play the Prince straighter (in both senses) and more vulnerable, the character would have been more interesting and the story would have had more subtlety.
Simplistic and greeting-card conventional as it is, The Illusionist is a good-looking movie in a traditional costume-pic sort of way, and you have the feeling it actually was probably shot either in Vienna or somewhere that for Americans can pass for Vienna. There are nice street scenes and crowd scenes and the look is glossy without being overbearing or calling attention to itself -- it doesn't surprise you either, though.
After the heroine comes to grief, things get messy and a bit confusing, where before they had all been orderly and well-paced. It's not clear what's gone wrong, but bad editing certainly is a factor. The way everything is explained in a montage of flash-shot reviews of past moments doesn't make up for the anticlimax. The Illusionist has a few good scenes, but no high drama. It is not helped by the chilly little voice Norton adopts, perhaps imitating some Forties costume drama, which the director himself may have wished to evoke.