Never ask me about my business.

Rating: 7/10 (7 August 2007)

Dark, brooding piece about the rivalry between two turn-of-the century stage illusionists outdoing each other. One of the young men, Borden (Christian Bale) may have been responsible for the death of the other's beloved blond wife, the other being Angier (Hugh Jackman). Angier and his mentor, Michael Caine, continue their careers, while Borden builds his own.
The emotional tumult caused by the death of Angier's wife leads him to sabotage Borden's performance, actually shooting two of his fingers off. Borden, filled with resentment, retaliates by putting a major crimp into Angier's career. It gets a little complicated but they both wind up more or less at the top of the prestidigitative heap before the end.
There are romances flung into the pot too, functional to the extent that they illustrate character development in the two magicians and act as links between the two competitors. Scarlette Johansson is surprisingly good as the bosomy stage assistant with the working-class Brit accent, even though the dialect suppresses her usual croak. Rebecca Hall is splendid as the perceptive woman who takes up with the lower-class Borden, even though she knows he's lying half the time when he tells her he loves her. (He's married to his job, you see.) Enter Nicolas Tesla, the very real historical figure who did all sorts of things, conceptual and physical, that strike some of us as a little outré today. A man ahead of his time, played by an unrecognizable David Bowie.
At this point, what was a more or less cogent drama turns into something else. Tesla, like Baron Frankenstein, pulls off something that's half scientific and half supernatural. If you've seen "The Fly" you have some idea, only the idea you have is a little simpler than the one presented here. I was a little confused by the ending in which "all is explained" but somewhat too perfunctorily for me. Maybe I'm dull but the jigsaw puzzle remained mostly a table full of scattered and disjointed pieces.
The photography captures the time and place nicely. Too nicely, maybe, because it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to live in a landscape of perpetual poverty and gloom. If there was a scene in bright daylight, I missed it. Do we learn anything about the tricks of stage magicians? Are you kidding? Illusionists have the kinds of social borders (us inside, them outside) that cops have, or airline pilots or doctors. The trick is told when the trick is sold. We do see some of the machinations but they're ones we might have easily figured out for ourselves. The ultimate trick, the one devised by Tesla, is of course never explained because it never happened.
I hope you don't find these comments confusing. If you do, the film will present an even greater challenge. Still, it's worth watching for anyone with mature sensibilities. Confusing, maybe. Pandering, no.