2008 Woodie Awards
The Prestige: Bale and Jackman show on-screen chemistry, prove it's not just smoke and mirrors
Mike Kauffmann '07
Issue date: 11/10/06 Section: Entertainment
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As a director, Christopher Nolan has always had a few tricks up his sleeve. Made famous by the backwards movie, Memento, and more recently for reviving the stale Batman series, in The Prestige, Nolan applies his tricks to a trade quite suited for them: magicians.
It's Batman versus Wolverine in the form of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as competing showmen; Bale plays Alfred Borden, a magician from the lower classes of London, while Jackman portrays Robert Angier, a wealthy lord-turned-magician. The movie also stars Michael Caine, excellent as always, as an older magician and trickster, and Scarlett Johansson, in a role well below her talents as on-stage eye candy. Also, keep two different-colored-eyes out for David Bowie as the physicist Nikolai Tesla.
The movie gets its title from the third act of a magician's trick (as explained to the viewers by Caine). The first is the pledge, in which the magician establishes a trick with an ordinary object. In the second act, the turn, the magician "makes his ordinary something do something extraordinary." The final act is the prestige, the final twist, the real trick, making something that disappears reappear.
The magician's trick and the film itself move in parallel. The movie takes its twist on the conventional three act structure by focusing it on one trick, the trick of all tricks, the transporting man, and Borden and Angier's quests to master it.
Nolan's storytelling is creative as always, alternating between the two men's journals as they reflect on them at different times in their lives. All the formal aspects of the film are excellent; Jackman and Bale's acting propels the tension as each one tries to outdo the other. It isn't cute, either. These are very serious showmen working on a very competitive stage in Victorian England. The lengths they go in attempting to disrupt each other's act are dark and unrelenting. There are lives trapped in the middle of these dueling magicians, and there are lives ruined in the process.
It's Batman versus Wolverine in the form of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as competing showmen; Bale plays Alfred Borden, a magician from the lower classes of London, while Jackman portrays Robert Angier, a wealthy lord-turned-magician. The movie also stars Michael Caine, excellent as always, as an older magician and trickster, and Scarlett Johansson, in a role well below her talents as on-stage eye candy. Also, keep two different-colored-eyes out for David Bowie as the physicist Nikolai Tesla.
The movie gets its title from the third act of a magician's trick (as explained to the viewers by Caine). The first is the pledge, in which the magician establishes a trick with an ordinary object. In the second act, the turn, the magician "makes his ordinary something do something extraordinary." The final act is the prestige, the final twist, the real trick, making something that disappears reappear.
The magician's trick and the film itself move in parallel. The movie takes its twist on the conventional three act structure by focusing it on one trick, the trick of all tricks, the transporting man, and Borden and Angier's quests to master it.
Nolan's storytelling is creative as always, alternating between the two men's journals as they reflect on them at different times in their lives. All the formal aspects of the film are excellent; Jackman and Bale's acting propels the tension as each one tries to outdo the other. It isn't cute, either. These are very serious showmen working on a very competitive stage in Victorian England. The lengths they go in attempting to disrupt each other's act are dark and unrelenting. There are lives trapped in the middle of these dueling magicians, and there are lives ruined in the process.
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