The Prestige

Christopher Priest’s Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out the secrets behind their rivalry. It’s a very twisty and literary book, relying heavily on unreliable-narrator games, and doesn’t seem at all like the sort of thing that would play well on the screen.

I was surprised to hear that it had been adapted as a movie, then, and even more surprised to find that it’s a really well done movie. If anybody was going to succeed with this, it would’ve been Christopher Nolan, who did Memento, and he does probably as well as you possibly could with the material. There’s a good deal of adapation required to make it work visually, but the changes to the story are very effective, and true to the original spirit.

Nolan keeps the unreliable-narrator stuff alive by doing the movie as a set of interlocking flashbacks. The movie opens with Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) watching his rival Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) drown in a locked water tank below stage, and then moves to the prison where Borden is being held during his trial. In an effort to induce him to give up his secrets, a wealthy lord provides him with a copy of Angier’s diary covering a period in which Angier was deciphering Borden’s notebooks, in an effort to figure out how he did his signature illusion, “The Transported Man.”

The story jumps way back to the days when both Borden and Angier were assistants to another magician, and covers their rise to the top of the entertainment world in early 20th-century London. Angier blames Borden for his wife’s death, which starts a vicious and bloody rivalry that spans several years. Eventually, both rivals are doing competing versions of “The Transported Man,” in which the magician vanishes from one point on the stage, and reappears elsewhere. Angier becomes obsessed with figuring out how Borden does the trick, going so far as to travel to America to seek help from reclusive nutbar genius Nikola Tesla.

(As an aside, I really don’t get the fascination people have with Tesla, who turns up as a key figure in a large number of secret histories and pseudo-pulp novels about the period. Whatever the reason, he’s very effectively played here by David Bowie, a casting choice that frankly made me really nervous. It’s not camp in the least, thank God.)

Despite advice from both Bowie as Tesla and Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Angier continues to pursue his obsession, launching a spectacular new version of the trick, and taking his rivalry with Borden in a new and monstrous direction. There are schemes within schemes here, and the double-crosses continue even beyond death.

Bale and Jackman give very good performances, and Caine and Bowie (and Andy Serkis as Tesla’s henchman) do a great job with their supporting roles. Bale in particular does an excellent job of showing the conflict and desperation of Borden’s chaarcter. Scarlett Johansson looks very pretty, but doesn’t have a lot to do as the woman caught between them, and the rest of the cast is a collection of “haven’t I seen you in something else?” British actors.

The real highlights here are the script and direction. The script puts enough information out there to let you see how the trick is done (if you’ve read the book, and know how it ends), but also makes just enough changes to the original to keep you guessing. And the direction is similarly excellent– the movie always plays fair, and the real secret becomes progressively more obvious as the story unfolds, if you know where to look, but it doesn’t give it away before the appropriate moment.

I do wonder how the movie comes off to someone who doesn’t already know how the trick is done. I think I can see that it’s constructed well even from that perspective, but the story is dependent enough on the secret that I might be completely wrong. I do recommend both the book and the movie, though it’s hard to say which would be more affected by prior knowledge. I’d probably go with seeing the movie first– if nothing else, it’s shorter…