According to Christopher Nolan’s underrated magician-at-war film, The Prestige, there are three aspects to every magic trick: The Pledge, The Turn and The Prestige. Fittingly, you could fit those three stages into one if the most formative periods of the career of the notoriously tricky director with the first, The Pledge representing Batman Begins with Nolan showing us the “ordinary”, aka. a superhero movie. The third, or the big finish, would undoubtedly be the sizeable impact that the The Dark Knight had on the world of the blockbuster as it pumped intelligence and unpredictability into a well worn genre. However, Nolan’s ascension into the realms of mega-budgeted filmmaking couldn’t have happened without the most complex part of the trick, The Turn; and that’s where The Prestige comes in, maybe the most overlooked entry in the director’s cannon.
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In 1880s London, both Robert Angier and Alfred Borden are shills in the employment of John Cutter, an engineer who works in the realms of stage magic. However, the camaraderie between to two men shifts into the realms of bitter competition when a apparent mistake by Borden costs the life of Angier’s wife during an act and as time goes on, the feud starts to get ever more vicious and personal as both men strive to out do each other’s act at any cost, each doing the other harm with every blow.
Their professional rivalry hinges on the performance of something called The Transported Man, a trick that seemingly sees the one performing the trick teleported from one space to another in the time it takes to bounce a ball or catch a hat, but while Borden’s version of the trick is technically superior, the more showbiz savvy Angier obsesses over how it’s done, simply refusing to believe it could be as simple as merely using a double.
While the two make their fame and fortune out doing each other both publicly and personally, it unsurprisingly takes a sizable toll on their private lives. Borden’s wife, Sarah, finds it increasing difficult with a man who overtly loves her one day, yet is cold and utterly devoted to his craft the next while Angier’s obsession leads him to travel to America and press inventor Nikola Tesla for an invention that’ll help him get one over his rival in life, love and magic.
While Cutter, Sarah and emotionally torn magician’s assistant Olivia find themselves mere collateral damage, not even Borden can predict the lengths Angier will go to to ultimately prove he’s the better magician and with the help of Tesla’s invention, he pays a price for his vengence that few can possibly comprehend. But in the face of such mind-bending revelations, it turns out Bordan has been leading a life equally full of devoted self-sacrifice.
When I first watched The Prestige, I believed that while it was an incredibly good psychological thriller that played in the world of magic and trickery like no other – however, upon a second viewing, the true magic of the film is truly revealed. While I’m loathe to give away the film’s secrets straight away, once The Prestige is finally revealed, a second look at all the misdirections and fake-outs results in a movie, far smarter that it initially appeared – and it was pretty damn smart to begin with.
Of course, putting a human face to Nolan’s particular brand of mind-fuckery is the pairing of Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale who imbue their warring characters with their respective traits. Jackman, ever the showman even long before The Greatest Showman, starts the movie as the more amiable, approachable one, gathering up the grief of his drowned wife to be the far more empathetic of the two while Bale is naturally the more intense, edgier one of the two, seemingly cast as the more flawed of the two, especially after he seemingly is incapable or unwilling to fully take responsibility for the tragic accident.
However, as the incredibly complex tale gathers momentum, Nolan starts to ruthlessly shift the goalposts numerous times as each men’s fortunes shift thanks to their repeated bouts of tit-for-tat. Angier’s inability to move on from locking horns with his nemesis gradually has him taking a darker path with seemingly no remorse.
On the flip-side, while Borden seemingly engages in similarly destructive behavior, driving his wife to despair with his a constantly changing personality and even engages in a doomed affair with his foes former lover, Olivia, he starts to display far more human reactions than the man who has been legitimately been wronged.
Upon a first viewing it’s obvious that The Prestige is undoubtedly coming in hot with a desire to confound and bedazzle and it originally seemed that Nolan was willing to make sacrifices to pull his metaphorical thrill-rabbit out of his hat. Not only do Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson (sporting a decidedly distracting english accent) get sort of shoved to the wayside by merely being living litmus paper to their men’s peculiarities, but there’s a more than one instance where certain shifts in character or plot don’t feel as polished or thought out as they might.
However, once you’ve given The Prestige a second go after you’ve learnt all of its secrets, the movie fully reveals itself as the masterpiece it rightfully is. Moments that previously felt half baked or characters that seemed under served suddenly have renewed meaning as the whole basis of the movie proves to be much more like an actual magic trick than you first thought.
The details you needed to work out Nolan’s sleights of hand are under your nose the entire time and are, as Sarah states at one point, fairly obvious once you know how it’s done, but that doesn’t stop repeated viewings hammering home that this could actually the finest trick the director ever pulled.
On top of all this, we even get the best Nolan/Michael Caine collaboration to date (no, seriously) and an utterly bizarre role for a moustachioed, accented David Bowie as Nikolas Tesla, but what stays with you the longest is the legitimately creepy denouement that forces us to face the sci-fi/horror tinged results of Angier’s obsession head on.
As tricksy as Christopher Nolan has ever been, The Prestige is that rare occurrence where a movie not only requires at least two viewings to fully appreciate its genius, but remains fantastic in noticably different ways depending on whether it’s the first or second viewing.
Totally gripping, utterly fascinating and magnificently devastating, step right up to witness the greatest, cinematic, Abracadabra Nolan ever pulled.
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