Casts a Magical Spell Even Over the Magic non-Fan

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2006)

After a slow start, during which I was tempted to walk out of the movie (but I did not, because I'd read positive reviews here), "The Prestige" did cast its spell over me.
"The Prestige" is visually lush, with high production values. Ornate Victorian coaches, gleaming beaver-skin top hats, high and low rent theaters and slums are recreated in glorious, or inglorious, as appropriate, detail.
The actors are all fine. Scarlett Johansson did not annoy me as she usually does; the director got a real performance out of her, as well as got her to wear her usual revealing neckline. Hugh Jackman is well cast as a man with a charming surface and a dangerous, secret interior life. I've never seen Michael Caine more appealing. He's the older mentor character here, and he doesn't seem so much to be performing as just being.
Christian Bale is riveting as a young, scary, ambitious Cockney magician.
I wasn't crazy about David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. (His name *was* "Nikola," not "Nicholas.") I think of Bowie as a man who shocks, and he was uninteresting here. Tesla is an historical figure who lived a fascinating, controversial life, and I just didn't see much of that on screen. And Bowie's accent was all wrong; it was a big deal that Tesla was a Serb. Depicting him with a Dutch accent, as Bowie seemed to be doing, is kind of like depicting an African American historical figure as a WASP.
Andy Serkis, as Tesla's assistant, was one of the most fun things to watch in the whole movie. I kept thinking, as I was watching him, "Who is that guy? Have I seen that guy before? Whoever he is, he is really fun to watch." Dang if it wasn't Gollum, from LOTR.
The movie offers a few tidbits from the world of magic -- a cameo by famed NY stage magician and historian of magic, Ricky Jay; discussions of how various tricks were performed; magic lore. But this is never heavy handed, and though I'm bored by discussions of stage magic, these scenes didn't put me off.
The plot -- well, I can't say anything about the plot. Part of the reason for watching the movie is the pleasure of attempting to work out the puzzle as you watch the film.
The plot is a device to depict two men going at each other's throats, and losing their own souls by doing so. Ambition, Envy, Pride, Competition, Secretiveness, Obsession: lotsa big themes we can all relate to, whether we are Victorian magicians or not.
What was missing, for me, in this otherwise quite excellent movie, was any emotional depth.
A couple of examples.
In his early scenes, I had a hard time believing Hugh Jackman as a hungry young magician. He is in his late thirties, and he looks it.
His character is married to a much younger woman, who is blonde and pretty, and passive, as a doll. She's little more than fringe on the stage. I had a hard time believing their marriage. Given the importance, to the plot, of their union, this inability to invest in their marriage was almost fatal to my ability to invest in the movie.
A key female character's suicide rang false to me for a couple of reasons. This was a very likable character, and her suicide threw the movie terribly off. Her suicide was never reacted to with any appropriate depth. At that point, the movie really did seem like too much of a wind-up toy that existed only to serve its trick ending.
This is especially unfortunate, because a key line, "I love you today," and its ultimate meaning, speaks volumes about the nature of love.
Poor Scarlett Johansson, who may never overcome the curse of her lush body and director's urges to exploit it, is made to fall in love a couple of times, and her only motivation for taking this monumental step is that she is given seconds-long scenes in which she looks into a man's eyes and -- SNAP! -- falls in love.
With just a little work and a few more lines of dialogue and action to fully animate its female characters, "The Prestige" could have been that most perfect of creations, a movie that entertains both men and women. For primarily male viewers, there is the clockwork plot and the cutthroat competition. For female viewers, there could have been fully realized characters, including fully realized female characters, inhabiting a film that has a heart as well as a crafty little head hiding schemes.
Instead, the only real warmth in the movie comes from Michael Caine, the wise old man whom directors love in a way that they could never love disposable young female beauties like Scarlett Johansson, and a movie that this viewer could very much like, but never love.