The Prestige

I don't often get the opportunity to sit down and watch movies anymore. It's a sad and rather ironic turn of events, I spend more time making films than I do watching those films that do and don't inspire me. But, occasionally, I find a few hours here or there and get a chance to relax in front of the boob tube.

Spurred on by the overwhelming "Brick", I made a little more time this weekend to actually watch a movie. There are quite a few on rental shelves that I want to get around to, but for right now, I had to pick one. Thus came "The Prestige". I've now seen 3 of Christopher Nolan's 4 major motion pictures (the only one I've yet to see is "Insomnia"). I don't know if I'd say I'm a "fan" of Nolan's movies. "Memento" left me cold. I hearald "Batman Begins" as the best comic book film to date. "The Prestige" fits somewhere in the middle.

"The Prestige", set in England and Colorado at the turn of the century (1899), is about two rival Magicians/Illusionists, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman in another very good performance) and Robert Borden (Christian Bale in another better than very good performance). When Angier's (Jackman) wife is accidentally killed in a failed illusion, he blames Borden (Bale) for her death. Thus sets up a story of revenge and obsession that plays out in a non-linear fasion.

It works... for the most part. It has some problems, one of which is at 130 minutes, it is too long. All of Act I and some of Act II feel as though they could have been condensed. And the main problem is that Nolan spends so much time and detail showing us the set up for the inevitable twist, that it's hard not to know what's coming. That being said, I quite liked the story and Nolan's presentation of the story. It's a metaphor of filmmaking itself. The more you learn about exactly how things are done in movies, the less they capture your imagination. The same is true here. The more Angier wants to learn exactly how Borden does his trick, the less magic and enjoyment simple "illusion" holds for him. He believes that it's REAL magic, thus sets out to prove that with disasterous consequences. There is a valid moral here and it comes through in spades.

A note on the "Magic" tricks in the film. I like simple things. I don't like allot of computer generated who-ha that looks pretty. I really have to give it to Nolan and his team for coming up with simple contraptions and camera tricks to tackle most of the magic. Sure, there's some CG here and there but it's spare. When we finally see (as Jackman's character puts it) "...the greatest magic trick I've ever seen." I was genuinely impressed by the trick, the trick's simplicity, and how the trick was depicted on film. It's things like this that hooked me into the movie despite a couple of problems with it.

So, I recommend "The Presitge", I'd even like to see it again. It's a good movie, maybe not a great one. When you watch it, remember this... "People don't care about the man in the box. Making someone disappear is easy."