Near-enough to magical; Nolan's twisting, agonising tale of love and aloofness makes for good viewing.

Rating: 7/10 (30 October 2011)

The Prestiege is about performers performing at the top of their game without necessarily being at the peak of their well-being. It's about an emotional drive; a lust to conquer the seemingly impossible, a lust to pound one's opponent into the ground by showing up their entertainments and furthering the superiority that yours has. There are points in the film in which sheer anger and pure, unadulterated drive born out of one's deep feelings see certain characters get to where they are in the entertainments business depicted within; successes born out the hatred for a competitor, and the need to trump him, rather than because their respective show naturally progresses to the performances they end up doing.
Director Christopher Nolan's film explores the quite maddening extent to which men within a particular field go, not necessarily for financial gain but to see their competitors, with whom they share a painful back-story, go nuts in trying to work out the extent of the practise. His film is ultimately a peek into the depraved nature of such a pastime, an exploring of a lust for quest for supremacy in so much one person is able to do what no one else in the world is capable. Such a back and forth is played out in The Prestiege, it here having an air of freshness to it in so much it is played out not as a contemporary crime thriller or similarly toned piece making use of the familiar hypothesis, but as a period drama, in late nineteenth century London, and somewhat remarkably revolves around people engaged in the career field of magic.
We begin in the present on a strand seeing Christian Bale's Alfred Borden in prison, a man seemingly guilty of a drowning which he is accused of perpetrating; during these early scenes, we get a small measure of how much the secrecy of these people's magic means to them when Borden holds back on certain nuggets of information - despite both his freedom and his daughter's well-being there at stake. Miles away, Borden's ex-partner, Hugh Jackman's Robert Angier, is desperate for a meeting with an elusive elderly gentlemen based in some isolated snowy American nether-regions; his presence rearing the attention of somebody operating there, whom he has before neither met nor seen, but who directs praise at Angier for his work within the field of magic and stage trickery. Running on what Nolan achieved in Memento, in terms of tearing up the time-lines and flitting from one moment in time to another, we dart back to the very beginning of where it all began to go wrong for Angier and Borden.
In the past, the pair of them operated in a troupé led by the suave expert in his field, John Cutter (Caine); Angier's wife Julia (Perabo) and a master of ceremonies character in true-to-life magician Ricky Jay. Backstage, and prior to going out so as to perform what they've been performing for a good stretch of time beforehand, the characters appear to clash in regards to what direction the group ought to head from here on in; Borden desiring the moving onwards and upwards to better things but whose enthusiasm is unmatched. During one particular show, tragedy strikes when disaster befalls a specific trick involving Julia and a seemingly-impossible escape from a glass container full with water; Julia not getting out in time and drowning before Angier's very eyes, thus the murder of which Bale was accused during the opening thus rears its head. What unfolds is an extension of the diligent lengths Nolan went during 2002's Insomnia, a film about a police officer seen killing another police officer by the very man he is there to catch; a film spilling out into a power struggle between two men of whom moral lines are blurred and one appears as distasteful as the other in spite of the fact they are near-enough poles apart. This is another one of those films in which heterosexual romances unfold around the fact that the film is ultimately about men and men co-existing with one another, and that nothing can deter them from what life's true purpose seemingly offers up: the need to quench a drive for implementing defeat upon them.
Nolan deals with each strand attentively and in a thorough manner; the film's story, cascading into a bitter rivalry built on resentment never quite made clear as to whether it's out of anger of a false-accusation; unadulterated revenge or just pure hatred and jealousy for another man, is difficult not to get caught up in. Amongst this, the multi-equilibrium approach expressed through Angier's apparent attempts to bury ghosts in his venturing to America acts as a fascinating post-scripture to predominant duelling. It is something that furthermore carries with it enough enticing drama, as this lead becomes more and more involved with apparent recluse madmen, to follow the film on through to a denouement dealing with questions posed throughout the project's main body. A quaint parallel lies with the fact Nolan knows he is making a film about people putting on a show; people wanting to do their best for a paying audience out to see those whom they recognise going through motions inherently and professionally. His film, itself full of tricks and twists causing us to take a step back and think about it, is just as good-a slice of showmanship as anything his characters can conjure up.