Sleight of Hand

The Prestige is less than meets the eye.

by Shaun Brady

Any good magic show hinges on the audience's pleasure at being duped, while thinking they may just have the magician sussed. But The Prestige is so eager to show off its own cleverness that it spoils the trick.

Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star as a pair of rival magicians in late-19th-century England. In the classic tradition, the two start out as young friends, fellow assistants to a staid older magician played by real-life illusionist Ricky Jay, before ambition and tragedy turn them into bitter rivals. The remainder of the story plays out like a heist film, the two utilizing their onstage trickery in a deadly backstage game of oneupsmanship.

NOW YOU SEE IT: Hugh Jackman prepares his next trick.

Christopher Nolan, adapting Christopher Priest's novel with his brother Jonathan, reveals the story in puzzle-box fashion, with a flashback-within-a-memoir-within-a-diary structure that serves as sleight-of-hand misdirection from the plot's convoluted mechanics. But while constantly haranguing the audience with "Are you watching closely?" taunts, Nolan winks a few times too often, revealing the seams of his trap door long before he even has a chance to disappear.

As long as the illusion is maintained, Nolan's act is as much fun to watch (if as ultimately hollow) as any smoke-and-mirrors routine. The Prestige is centered on a competition between two of the director's trademark obsessives, with Bale as haunted and driven as Bruce Wayne and Jackman a secretive avenging angel patterned on Memento's Leonard. The period setting places the action at the juncture of a new scientific age, when the public is prepared to accept a little magic if they can be sure it's just a trick, but are ready to riot at the idea that science may make the illusory a reality.

That idea is played out in a secondary rivalry, between Nikola Tesla, as played by a slightly demented David Bowie, and Thomas Edison, represented only by a pair of thugs who arrive to foil Tesla's experiments. While Edison's strong-arm tactics are historically accurate, rumors of Tesla's outré achievements are fleshed out to give the last act a sci-fi twist, a bit of a cheat given the low-rent, quicker-than-the-eye technology that has fueled the gimmickry up to that point.

Nolan provides a bit of showmanship with his supporting cast: Michael Caine, accompanying Bale from Batman Begins, and Scarlett Johansson, apparently cast more for her ability to fill her stage assistant's bustier than to maintain a credible British accent.

Early on, Bale teaches a young fan a simple trick, with a bit of advice: "The secret impresses no one; the trick you use it for is everything." Nolan fails to heed his own advice, however, revealing all his secrets after employing them for a trick that fails to wow the crowd.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Prestige

Directed by Christopher NolanA Newmarket Films releaseNow playing at area theaters