The Prestige
dir. Christopher Nolan



"Grifter's got the irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothing to whipping a fool; hell, fools were made to be whipped. But to take another pro, even your partner, who knows you
and has his eyes on you, that's a score."

- The Grifters

There are three parts, Michael Caine tells us, to every magic trick:

1) The Pledge, wherein the magician introduces an "ordinary, everyday object" like a deck of cards, a coin, an animal or a human
2) The Turn, wherein the magician does "something extraordinary" with that object (usually makes it disappear)
3) The Prestige, wherein the magician returns the object to its original (or perhaps improved) state

There's nothing to making something disappear, it's making something come BACK that earns the applause.

The Prestige is another puzzler from Christopher Memento Nolan. Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are two apprentice magician's whose partnership turns to rivalry after the on-stage death of Angier's wife.

The two men pursue each other across Victorian England and into the mountains of Colorado, trying to out-do one another. They read each other's diaries, they steal each other's tricks, they hire Nikola Tesla to build fantabulous contraptions.

But, as with any good trick, you know you're being set up while you watch. You can't believe what you see. Something is coming.

In The Pledge, Nolan introduces us to our "everyday, ordinary" stage performers.

In the Turn, he ups the ante on their professional and personal rivalry, switching loyalties, reversing roles, introducing body doubles and misdirecting us with beautiful assistants.

And The Prestige? Well, you'll have to see the movie.

One of the things that can be distracting with a film like this is that you don't know what to make of the emotions you see onscreen. In Memento, the amnesiac Lenny describes his condition as being like waking: you feel guilty or angry and you just don't know why, so you latch on to certainties like the weight of an ashtray or the solidity of wood.

The only problem is that life isn't filled with certainties so you begin building sand castles of supposition and then something comes along (The Turn) which knocks those castles over and you just have to have faith that The Prestige will set them aright once again.

This emotional alienation didn't hurt Memento much, for at its heart it is a noir thriller/actioner and a highly narcissistic one at that. Lenny lives in a world where other people's feelings pretty much don't matter at all. It's just him, his dead wife and John G.

The Prestige, however, is a story about multiple characters caught up in a web of obsession. Everybody's either in love or trying to steal something or trying to bait or trap someone at every minute. Given all the intrigue between the characters, you find yourself fidgeting in your seat, not knowing if an expression of love or hate is sincere or just all part of the misdirection.

In the end, when The Prestige comes, as with Nolan's other work, we are forced to re-examine and re-evaluate our impressions of the main characters. On this level, the film succeeds. Seeing it once, you want to see it again.

In this, Nolan undoes one of his primary theses: no one cares about the man in the box, it's the man onstage that gets the applause. Why do magicians never reveal their secrets? Because, the beauty of a trick is not in the secret, but in what you DO with that secret and once audiences know your secret, they don't need YOU anymore.

But Nolan has defied this in both Memento AND The Prestige. Knowing the secret to these films enhances the joy of rewatching them.

An odd turn of phrase, a quick glance between lovers, a matchbox left on a bar table, a pen hidden from view, a black eye, a spent shell casing on the seat of your car. Nolan introduces these little items into his films, any one, two or three of which might be perfectly ignorable. Like Lenny, rummaging through the ashes of his wife's personal belongings, we wonder what meaning we best can apply to these items.

And then comes The Prestige, and we see that the truth has been staring us in the face all along. And we laugh like it's Buddha's birthday.

Three stars. The Amazing Jason says, "are you watching closely?"