A wonderful magician... but a dreadful showman

Rating: 9/10 (26 October 2008)

According to Micheal Caine's grizzled Cockney showman Cutter, every great magic trick consists of three parts.
The first is the pledge - our magician shows us something ordinary. In the opening minutes of The Prestige Nolan fans will certainly feel on safe territory. The nonlinear narrative jerks us, under the familiar tones of Micheal Caine (currently Nolan's go-to man for Wise Old Associates), into the world of late-Victorian showmen - a world of canary cages and dusty warehouses, red curtains and blinding spotlights.
Nolan's familiar themes of all-encompassing obsession (tackled brilliantly in his Batman films and the earlier Memento) are instantly addressed in the characters of Alfred Borden and Robert Angier, two magicians locked into a battle of wits over the accidental death of Angier's wife - of which he holds Borden responsible. Like a latter-day Hitchcock, Nolan has carved out a style of thriller all of his own - the washed-out orange filters, the noir-y smoky streets, Christian Bale, Micheal Caine. Strip back the super-hero elements and you've almost got a Victorian Batman Begins - except with two Batman's who prefer to use their brains over their fists.
The second part of any great trick is the turn - in which our magician takes the ordinary something, and makes it do something extraordinary. It's from this comfortable position that The Prestige's increasingly convoluted and at times outright nasty plot can unfold - as the rivalry increases, consuming their entire lives, Angier finds himself drawn deeper into something close to true magic - and like all true magic, your disbelief - the 'look on their faces,' the source of Angier's obsession - becomes paramount, as Nolan is giving full reign to introduce the truly fantastical.
Like Hitchcock the plot is everything - all the characters and backdrops are for the most part - like Scarlet Johanson's assistant - set dressing. In The Prestige everything hinges upon the twist. Nolan is perhaps the finest thriller director working in Hollywood today, yet the true human focus of his films is often subservient to the narrative - and The Prestige is no different.
Borden's relationship with his wife seems unnecessarily forced (despite Bale's decent performance) and a little devoid of chemistry, as is Angier's with his assistant (Johanson) - yet this matters little, as the human element is there only to make the shocks more potent. As Cutter says, a lovely assistant is often one of the best forms of misdirection, and as The Prestige's narrative unfolds this soon becomes apparent in the film itself. The exception is David Bowie's surprisingly poignant turn as long-suffering failed genius Nikola Tesla, and the ever-reliable Micheal Caine.
Finally at the end of any good trick, a magician brings back the object, the final deception - The Prestige. And as seems to be the case with all thrillers post-Usual Suspects, the twists in The Prestige's final reveal will completely change your viewing experience a second-time around.
So... is the trick a success? Perhaps Angier's words sum up Christopher Nolan best - 'A wonderful magician, but a dreadful showman.' The narrative itself, the film's core, is perfect - in fact its twists and turns, its self-referencing, its playfulness elevate it above almost any other thriller released since.
Yet where Nolan falls down is the presentation. Cinematography ranges from competent to good, but you don't get any Kubrick-style flashes of genius. Other than the two characters driving the plot, there's not a lot of human emotion to the proceedings - you never find yourself particularly caring for many of the side-characters, even when terrible things befall them (and without meaning to give too much away, terrible things DO befall a few of them). I've already compared Nolan to Hitchcock - a little hyperbolic, maybe, but he's the closest thing we have these days to the master - and he shares his faults, too.
And yet for all that, The Prestige is a trick not to be missed, a rare enigmatic gem of a film that fails to give up all its secrets even at the end. A must-see for thriller fans, and an awe-inspiring treat for everyone else - and unlike the tricks it portrays, definitely worth seeing twice.