(2006) In London in the latter half of the last decade of the 19th century, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bales), working for a stage magician, playing the part of plants in the audience who then tie up Angier's wife, Julia (Piper Perabo), before she gets dropped into a tank of water from which she must escape, become bitter rivals after Julia drowns. Years later Borden, whom Angier had held responsible for his wife's death, is accused of Angier's murder.

There are three stages to an illusion: first is the pledge when what appears to be an ordinary object or person is presented to the audience; next is the turn during which the ordinary, through some misdirection or machination, becomes extraordinary (e.g., disappears); last is the prestige: the mysterious reappearance of the object or person.

John Cutter (Michael Caine) is Borden's ingenuier, who devises devices to disguise the trick in order to deceive the audience. But Angier repeatedly appears in his own false face, undoing the illusion to spoil the performance. After losing two fingers in a ruined disappearing-bird trick, desperate to find something spectacular enough to support his wife Sarah (Rebecca Hall) and their daughter Jess, Borden comes up with the Transported Man in which he drops a rubber ball on one side of the stage before entering a closet and re-emerging seconds later from another closet on the opposite side of the stage to retrieve the bouncing ball.

Cutter joins Angier in an attempt to better Borden's trickery, but the best they can come up with - "You're a magician, not a wizard," Cutter reminds Angier - is a double. This is not enough to satisfy Angier who desires Borden's secret: "I need to know how he does it … so that I can do it better!" He uses his attractive assistant Olivia Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson) to steal Borden's diary, containing the secrets of his tricks, which is written in cipher. He finally obtains the key word to unlock the diary's encryption, leading him to Colorado Springs and Tesla (David Bowie), whose experiments with electricity have made him a rival of Thomas Edison.

After listening to Angier's plea for a real magical device, Tesla tells him that nothing is impossible, just expensive, to which Angier replies that cost is not an obstacle.

Director/writer Christopher Nolan's film ignores its own advice that it is the illusion, not the revealed secret, that impresses. Clever by half with its convoluted folds of complexity: of pledges, wireless lamps, twists of turns, a field of top silk hats and black cats, and at least one prestige of surprise, it nevertheless fails to astonish. Unlike another film of the same year, The Illusionist, the real magic of romance is missing.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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