Derailed by its own Prestige

Rating: 4/10 (19 July 2016)

The Prestige opens and closes with Michael Caine's stage engineer Cutter informing us of the three acts behind every magic trick. The pledge: setting up something that seems ordinary (a bird), the turn: making that thing do something extraordinary (the bird disappears), and the prestige: restoring that thing to reality (the bird reappears). The final of the three, which is meant to be the hardest to achieve, is the key to the trick working. It's eerie then that the film collapses within the most crucial area. Its own prestige.
Nolan's film is effectively a game of showmanship between two rival magicians. How when one performs a trick that seems impossible, the other drives himself to the edge in order to figure out its secret. The film isn't really about magic. It's more about the magic in creating the perfect illusion. Yet it goes on to deal with heavier themes. Most notably the dangers of obsession. How our lead Robert Angier is frequently told that his obsession with his rival Alfred Borden will lead to grave consequences, and it eventually does. It's themes of obsession, guilt and deceit are so well handled that the film could have been about anything. The fact that both men happen to be magicians just adds to the overall mystique.
The trick itself is known as the 'Transported Man' and involves Borden entering a door on one side of the stage and emerging immediately from a door on the other side. Angier is convinced that a double is being used, despite Cutter claiming that it isn't possible, and sets up someone to look just like him. Of course the act is a success, until Borden sabotages it and leaves Angier even more determined to work out the secret. This is a fantastic pledge that the story has created. It leads to Angier travelling to snowy Colorado in order to find electricity genius Nikola Tesla (a fictionalised take on the man, played by David Bowie) who he believes can help him.
Both lead characters are strangely underwritten. It's understandable why the stern Borden and more flamboyant Angier would become rivals (and that's even without the death of Angier's wife to provide some forced conflict), but we know barely anything about them as individuals. Take away their obsessions and there is little below the surface. We need deeper insight to know what makes these men tick and in order to understand why they are taking such massive risks. It relies on actors with big screen presences to make the roles appear interesting, something that Bale and Jackman just about manage to accomplish.
What balances this out is its excellent directing, cinematography and pacing. Nolan's use of place and atmosphere has always been one of his strong points. He breathes life into his representation of early 1900's London and of the darkness that is consuming his leads. This is also one of the most clinical uses of a time shifting narrative I have seen, nothing seems awkwardly placed or moved. Nolan's prowess is what guides us through the pledge, but can he complete the cycle and deliver the ultimate prestige?
Well, is it possible for the payoff to totally derail a film? Yes, and here is the perfect example. The film constantly tells us to look at the smaller details, to 'look closer', that understanding the illusion is everything and that the cleverest ruse is what ultimately matters. It spends the entire run time telling us that magic isn't real or of any importance. But Angier's master trick can only be explained by magic. The audience has basically been deceived, in entirely the wrong way, by this 'twist'. The Sci-Fi elements that enter the fore in order to make the payoff work clash with everything, mainly because the film has been so heavily based in realism and real trickery. So what is it telling us? That everything that it talked about was a lie? It somehow manages to ruin its own prestige with such a convoluted and nonsensical twist.
The films climax is almost nothing but twists and turns. Scenes revealing that nothing was ever as it seems and deception was constantly taking place. I'm a big fan of films that have twists that leave you in awe or amazed. But the twist here is so left-field and against the very principal of the story that it ends up effectively derailing entire sections of the film, making sequences illogical in every aspect. It saddens me, because I was extremely impressed by the film on a technical level. The story was intriguing and it felt as if it was building to the most impressive payoff it could. Instead, we're left confused and irritated as the film simply throws the rule book out the window for its climax and decides its own fate.