The Illusionist

Decent movie, but forgettable. I watched it shortly after I saw "The Prestige,"
which came out around the same time.

By the trailers, it seemed like another Victorian era stage magician movie, this time in Vienna. Well, actually, Prague stands in for Vienna, but it plays its part beautifully. Pseudo-Euro accents, I suppose just to avoid sounding like Americans. But I don't care too much about accents, or I would have complained about Christian Bale's in "The Prestige".

Oddly enough, this movie also uses the same type of "end back where we began, except this time we know what it means" technique that "The Prestige" did. However, the tone of one movie was very different from the other.

Hmm. This one is not so much about revenge and obsession, nor the philosophy of magic, nor magic itself, nor even obsession with magic, but rather obsession with love. A more romantic story with more fantastical elements visually. A magician in Vienna (around 1900) ("Eisenheim", played by Edward Norton) is a master of his art, but he is still a "commoner", and being in love with his childhood friend, now a duchess (Jennifer Biel), well, it won't do. It won't do at all. Especially when the Prince (Rufus Sewell) wants to marry her. The Prince, an arrogant, highly intelligent rationalist fed up with the chaos and incompetance he sees in the empire he plans to inherit, sets his pet police inspector (Paul Giamatti) on the magician. The Chief Inspector is also anintelligent man, but more sympathetic to the magician. As for the duchess, she has always been in love with the magician. So they must perform their ultimate illusion, their audience the Prince and the Chief Inspector.

I preferred the "Prestige". While that one did have one very "unrealistic" (SF/fantasy) element, it did treat it honestly. And everything else felt solid. I thought the "Illusionist" cheated a little. Too many effects were too obviously CGI. Even if it was meant to be a subjective point of view (what the audience thinks it sees), it still was too much, I think. I didn't believe
in it. And if I didn't believe, the whole movie was...not as satisfying.
If we decide that it had a fantastical element a la "The Prestige", that also
is unsatisfying in this case. For "The Prestige", it didn't matter. For
"The Illusionist", it renders the movie rather pointless.
Perhaps the whole thing took place in the Matrix.

While the story, acting, music (Philip Glass!), and visual style of it were
good...yet...

It was all rather predictable. And this time I didn't have the excuse that
I'd read the book first! When the characters say things like "Make us
disappear!" and "He won't stop hunting us until we're dead!" and the
quarry is an illusionist, what else are we to expect? Eh?

Iconic image: an empty wooden chair alone on a stage...

The Prestige (book and movie)

This was a novel by Christopher Priest which was later adapted into a movie, directed by Christopher Nolan ("Batman Begins", which I didn't like, and "Memento" , which I did).


It's not the secret. The secret is trivial. It's how you use the secret that's important. It's how the secret contorts your life around it. It's how the secret affects those around you. THAT matters. Deeply. That's why it doesn't matter if you know the "twist" or not. It's still a great
story. For the same reason, it doesn't matter (to the meaning of the story) that a device that works in the story might not be possible in reality.

We have two young stage magicians in Victorian England. One way or the other, they end up as bitter rivals, constantly provoking each other and spying on each other to learn the other's secrets. In the book, it starts when Borden attempts to expose Angier as a fraud (when Angier performs as a spiritualist). In the movie, the two are initially friends under the same mentor. Borden is perhaps guilty in the death of Angier's wife.

Either way, it's bound to end in tragedy.

Now add in the magic and mystique of Nikolai Tesla! It's the dawn of the modern age, and where does science begin and magic end? Which is the true performance? The man onstage, or the
man offstage? Are you watching closely? Do you see what you see or what you expect to see? Illusion, deception, obsession.

I thought the movie was a very good adaptation. It dropped most of the framing devices (with the modern-era man who finds out about the past by reading diaries and so on), but still keeping some of the diary/journal idea by having the two rivals read each other's diaries instead.

In fact, this is one of the few cases where I felt the movie version was a bit stronger!
In the book, the ending just made me go "eh? what was that? why end it that way?" (But then, I thought that about Christopher Priest's The Glamour, too.)

The movie, of course, Hollywoodized it with extra doses of drama, but that isn't always a bad thing (for a movie!). Nolan did that "end where we started, except this time the same scene means something different". Perhaps he tried a little too hard (making the movie seem pretentious or heavy-handed at times, especially the very end), but it was still excellent. I really felt for the characters, even though they were not very likeable as people. Talk about making sacrifices for your art!

Since I'd read the book first, it wasn't really a surprise. The changes weren't quite what I expected. They made the character's choices scarier, I think, and the tone as a whole was perhaps darker/more violent. And Angier's machine...I felt it made more sense for it to work (if such a thing was possible at all!) the way it did in the movie rather than the way it did in the book. It felt as if Christopher Priest wimped out on it,
and went the less troublesome path with it.

Memorable novel, memorable film!

Iconic image (movie): a bunch of Victorian top hats strewn in the woods...
(And the rows and rows of birds in cages...very unsettling. Strips the humor
away when it's birds rather than hats.)