The Prestige (2006, USA, Christopher Nolan)

Wherein the de(con)struction begins...

And So Begin the Beguine of Ben:

Monica has brought home The Prestige for us to watch. It would appear that mine is falling when it comes to selecting viewing matter. David Bowie? Does not his participation in a movie mean it is junk, second only to Mike Jagger (and perhaps Sting) on this score?

And Dan:

Don't worry, The Prestige is okay--Bowie has a small part, and doesn't butcher it. I'm looking forward to your interpretation of the film's conclusion. While Bowie doesn't suck, Scarlet Johanssen, on the other hand, yikes! Hard to believe this is the same young actress who was so promising in Ghost World, Lost in Translation and The Man Who Wasn't There.

Then Ben:

I liked Lost in Translation quite a bit and Ghost World wasn't too bad either, think I saw The Man Who Wasn't There but don't remember, bad sign, I guess he really wasn't there, but it was Woody's Match Point that made me think that the girl lacked solid ability. Sure, she has "a quality," but it remains to be seen whether she has actual talent.

And Dan:

I'm pretty sure she can't act a lick. She can fill the screen, all right, but don't ask her to step outside of herself or you're asking for big trouble.

Then Ben Again:

I'm kicking myself for not sending you the email I wanted to before watching this movie. Because what I wanted to mention then, I want to mention now too and I would have liked to have won points for having a premonition of sorts. How appropriate for the apprecitation of mumbo-jumbo.

Your recent watching of Persona prompted me to surf the net for a little discussion of it. Wikipedia mentioned that the film has been considered an example of Brechtian alienation technique insofar as it it takes a meta-perspective of itself. Nevermind that Brecht's mandate is not simply a technical-aesthetic or even philosophic matter about self-referential frame-breaking but a strategy for ideological presentation. The present point made by Wikipedia is that Persona is hardly exceptional in this technical regard and lists a number of films that comment on themselves as being films: "Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (1926), Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Frederico Fellini's 8½ (1963), Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Bergman's own Dreams (1955) and The Magician (1958). There are hundreds of others." I have seen none of these but thanks to you, I have seen Sherlock Jr. (1924).

I wanted to share this with you before but now, having just seen TP, I want to assert that it is barely even a footnote to Buster Keaton's genius. This is true on any darn level you want to examine but the level I have in mind is the whole penetration into illusion. I'm not going to go off the deep end epistemologically, no worries. All I want to emphasize is what I emphasized previously about Keaton. He is actually still close enough to the theatrical stage, still engaged in actual physical performance, and so original with emergent film trickery, what he has to say about illusion is perhaps more profound today in the era of digital sampling, CGI and all the rest of it than it was back in the day.

Now, TP wants to go deep too but it's just not happening. The historic setting, the pursuit of the nature of illusion through the culture of theatrical magic, there is potential here and some fleeting impressions of making good on this potential. But so much of what might have been intellectually thrilling about TP gets bogged down if not completely lost in convoluted narrative. Monica tells me the film is based on a book and the result demonstrates the problems the film-maker encountered and often did not solve. The reading of the diaries, sometimes in voice over, the flashbacks, the repression of information that would naturally be revealed visually for the sake of the plot, et cetera. I imagine these things worked well on the page, but in TP there is considerable clunkiness - and this simply undermines whatever conceptual delight the film might have offered with respect to the power of illusion; never mind any degree of meta-awareness and questioning about it all from an imagistic or flimic orientation.

So what does this leave? Well, what is always left when serious thinking is not on board, a ripping tale and all that, with nifty twists and turns in a plot that is supposed to be hard to pin down, and perhaps some good characterizations along the way if we're lucky. Let me be swift about the latter. I did not warm up to the cast. When Michael Caine was off the screen, I had problems with all of the performances. As you warned, Johansson was dreadful, really irritating, and the other female lead not much better. But it was the two leading men that failed to win me over and not just because they had to play men of many faces, none of which were genuine until the big finish. There was some cleaver dialogue with respect to hints and codas in the plot but nothing to speak of for the constitution of complex characters. This is basically a portrait in rivalry and the characters serve the plot not as stock types but instrumentally nonetheless.

So, what of it? You said you would be interested to hear my feeling about the conclusion of the story. Well, at the risk of sounding like a party pooper, I have to brag that two out of the three main ontological revelations I had scoped long before the climax of the film. I knew pretty early on that the guy who takes the final bullet was the aristocrat hiding in the wings and I understood right away that Tesla's science-fiction technology was a cloning machine; indeed, upon it's arrival Monica leaned over to me and whispered: "Primer." What I did not know was that the guy who pulls the trigger in the finale was one half of a pair of identical twins. However, the fact that his sidekick with the diguise was so indispensible to his life and so recurrent in the plot made me suspicious of him. So when the curtain is drawn back and he is displayed as the twin brother, I felt that it was not such an amazing trick.

To the credit of the story, this twin business was hinted at in a number of scenes, especially to the "bad guy," (and therefore the audience), when he refuses to accept the obvious; i.e., that a double must be used in "The Transported Man" and what could be more ready-made for the trick than natural born twins? So, I'm not bothered by this and I appreciate the parallel between the escalating obsessiveness driving the rivalry and the progessive freakiness of the doubling tactics employed in order to perfect the trick. Still, I did feel it was kinda corny how the other guy was ultimately redeemed as a "good guy" in retrospect; he really did love his wife, his brother loved the other woman, yeah yeah, wimpy. And hey, it never was a fair fight. Two against one. That's a dirty trick, even among tricksters.

TP does provide some cursory thoughtfulness on the need to believe in magic, though. Confronted by what Weber called the "disenchantment of the world," surrounded by the sheer facticity of experience, discontent with this dull life opens up a need to challenge it. Not negate it. That is a spiritual or metaphysical calling. No, magic is all about beating physics at it's own game. The thrill has to do not with transcending matter entirely but rather merely denying it. The point is not to be free of the law of gravity but to defy it. Not to fly. But to float. TP does touch on this to some extent in it's sensitivity to the psychology of ritualized magical performance. It correctly points out that for the trick to work according to theatrical conventions, the audience must not have faith in the magic. Of course, the audience can not have technical knowledge of the mechanics of the act either. But inbetween these two, a "trick" has to do with not suspending disbelieve and believing at the same time. The power comes from this contradiction between materialist suppositions and empirical observation. ("I don't believe it!" and "Seeing is believing!" at the same time.) Giving over emotionally to this cognitive crisis is what magical theatre allows us to do. This is the psychology of illusion as performance art.

Too much goddamn music. Stop telling me how to feel. Patronizing Hollywood manipulation.

And Finally Dan:

Well, you're holding the film up to rather lofty standards with the Persona comp. It's a bit of Hollywood escapism, after all, while Bergman's film is something of a watershed. I think the Sherlock Jr. reference is fairer, as Keaton was, as Nolan (this is the same fella who directed Memento, doncha know?) is, plying his trade in the mainstream, not the arthouse. And measured by this standard, TP is pretty thin gruel indeed. It lacks Sherlock's keen playfulness, not to mention it's ability to confound and astound our understanding and appreciation of cinematic and theatrical reality. Nolan's film toys with a few of the notions that Keaton's film engages and probes in a much more rewarding fashion. The Prestige is countertop surface sheen, Sherlock Jr. the granite upon which it is built.

My initial response, which I posted over at Cinemarati was that it's an enjoyable enough film, but what interested me more the the one-upsmanship and plot twists were the meta-concepts at play, particularly in how the three act structure of the magic trick mirrored the conventional three act play of theatre, and by extension, cinema. Nolan's the magician at the helm of the film, providing us with, in turn, his version of the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. So I confess that I had a good time watching The Prestige, because I was never too worried about it adding up to anything mmuch more substantial that an elaborate magic trick. This is a plot (and to a much smaller degree, idea-) driven tale that forces its actors into the story's mechanisms, so I knew that hoping for interesting characterization would be folly. However, it isn't too much to ask for compelling performances, and I'd have to agree that Caine is the only one who delivers on that front. While I have enjoyed performances by Jackman and Bale in the past, they both seem a bit out of place here. Jackman is too modern for the part, and Bale too studied and aloof (though at least one of the characters he plays calls for some of that, so I will grant him that).

You've covered the flimsiness of the themes, but what I'm interested in is your response to the whole cloning apparatus. It seemed a bit too deux ex machina (literally) for my tastes, particularly given that this was supposed to be a film about a rivalry between illusionists, not scientific adventurers. This aspect of the film has confused a lot of people and led to some high-spirited debate over at Cinemarati, but I'm still waiting for someone to convince me that it was an appropriate way to wrap this thing up.