Malevolent magic

Everyone remembers seeing their first magic trick. (At least I can remember mine: a bit of business in which my ginger-haired uncle detached his index finger from his hand, only to return it safely moments later.) What amazed us kids, usually, was bearing witness to the impossible. Didn’t matter that, later, our uncle showed us how the trick was done. As Borden, Christian Bale’s character in The Prestige, points out to us: "The secret means nothing; the trick means everything."

Prestidigitation – or sleight of hand – is what magicians thrive on. Can we blame a movie about magic for revealing to us that magic is mostly sham? That’s part of the scaffolding behind Christopher Nolan’s latest film. He wants us to see at least some of the trickery and showmanship that makes magic work. Not all of it, of course; that would be telling.

Two young magicians in 1890s London – Borden and Angier (Hugh Jackman) – want to learn every trick in the book. They attend rival magicians’ performances, follow them backstage, try to unravel their tricks. The goal is to come up with something that will baffle even other magicians. Underlying it all is the assumption that there must be a trick behind every disappearing canary, every materializing fishbowl.

But that’s only part of it. According to their avuncular assistant Cutter (Michael Caine), every trick has three parts: The Pledge, in which a magician explains what he will attempt to do; The Turn involves a baffling event, usually a disappearance, building up suspense; finally there’s The Prestige, in which the pledge is fulfilled, the object restored, the trick completed. Can’t have a trick without all three parts.

Borden and Angier develop an obsessive rivalry, sparked by a tragic accident during a stage performance. Each seeks to ruin the other, but behind it is a more professional interest: each wants to know the other’s tricks. This Promethean curiosity is what dooms them to horrors far beyond the world of magic and illusion.

Nolan is a skilled non-linear storyteller who summons up storms of atmosphere like, well, a true magician. He brought us circuitously through Guy Pearce’s amnesiac world in Memento and Al Pacino’s insomnia spell in Insomnia. And he restored another superhero franchise with Batman Begins, also starring Christian Bale.

Here, with his brother Jonathan co-writing the screenplay, he wraps us tighter and tighter in the world of stage magic. The costumes, the backstage nuts and bolts, the dark streets of London are all convincing and evocative. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a rivalry without a pretty assistant: Scarlett Johansson is on hand, with her amazing push-up corset, to sow seeds of jealousy between the two budding Copperfields. But it’s a sad state of affairs when even Scarlett’s charms are used by the two men merely as a ploy to get inside each other’s heads. Here, Scarlett pretty much plays a cupcake, a piece of decoration. As my wife said, any other young actress could have played the role (though maybe not have filled out the corset as well). She does get to play some angry scenes, but her emotional range these days seems to stop short at snitty.

That’s okay, because the real relationship is between Angier and Borden ("A" and "B," if you will). After their rivalry leads to Borden losing two fingers in a bullet-catching trick, he devises a mind-boggling stunt that makes Angier green with envy. Convinced it’s no simple flim-flammery, he treks to Colorado Springs, USA, to find the reclusive Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American physicist who pioneered alternating current (AC power) and was reportedly working on teleportation and extraterrestrial communication up in the mountains. Angier wants the oddball physicist to build him the perfect stage trick. Tesla (played eerily well by David Bowie) provides just the dose of real-life weirdo magic to Borden and Angier’s workaday obsessions.

Like a lot of the most interesting films of 2006 (Inside Man, The Departed), The Prestige concerns itself with identity, its chimerical nature and our need to watch things ever so closely. Magic is a pretty good metaphor for movies as well, though what passes for movie magic nowadays is more often all-too-obvious trickery, not enough pledging and turning.

But wisely, Nolan relies on more tried-and-true devices: competition, human curiosity, well-turned performances from Andy Serkis and Rebecca Hall (as Borden’s long-suffering wife, Sarah) and some fine work from Caine.

If The Prestige resembles another movie in memory, it would be 1972’s Sleuth, in which a much younger Caine plays a callow actor having an affair with the wife of Laurence Olivier, a cuckolded gamesman. Their rivalry plays out inside an English townhouse where a robbery and murder ostensibly take place. There, Caine explores identities and stage prosthetics and both have a grand old time trying to send each other to hell.

The Prestige at least lives up to its three-part structure, though the third part might leave some baffled, others slightly unsatisfied. After such a skillful setup, the denouement falls a bit short of breathtaking. Angier’s final justification for all the backstabbing and shitty behavior on the part of these two prestidigitators – that it’s all "for the look on the audience’s faces" that magicians will go to the lengths of hell – could also be a metaphor for what propels movie directors. But dramatically, it falls slightly short of actual magic.