The Illusionist
*** (Cert PG)
Peter Bradshaw
Friday March 2, 2007
The Guardian
There's always the chance of some project-duplication in Hollywood. Recently, we had an extreme case: two films about Truman Capote. Now here's a second film about a controversial Victorian/Edwardian stage magician, who winds up playing a great big narrative trick on his tormentors - and on us, the audience.
It's a welcome corrective to the other magician film, which came out late last year: The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, about two competing conjurors. That was a rather swollen and self-admiring picture with an animatronic cameo from David Bowie; it proceeded at a stately pace - more David Nixon than David Blaine.
The Illusionist is more modest in conception, with more control and more focus; its trick ending is more guessable but more realistic and more satisfying, too. At its centre is an enigmatic showman in turn-of-the-century Vienna, played with charisma and poise by Edward Norton; the director is Neil Burger, who made the much-admired JFK conspiracy-mockumentary Interview With the Assassin in 2002. He has here freely adapted a 1997 short story by Pulitzer prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, and the result is a smart, sharp, economically achieved piece of work.
Vienna is an interesting location: the home of innovations in demagoguery, psychology and the inducement of mass hysteria. Norton plays Abramovitz, a low-born Austrian cabinet-maker's son who as a boy discovers in himself a vocation for magic.
He has an innocently platonic romance with aristocratic little Sophie, who has been charmed by his tricks: it is an ill-starred adventure which ends with the pair being tragically parted by the furious authorities. Years later, Abramovitz appears on stage in the capital, now called Eisenheim the Illusionist: a brilliant magician and the toast of the town with his staggering tricks, presented austerely, almost academically, without a glamorous assistant.
But fate is to provide him with one, the beautiful fiancee of no less a person than Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell). One night, to the excited gasps of the audience, Leopold superciliously allows his intended bride, played by Jessica Biel, to descend from the royal box and assist Eisenheim with a trick. It is only when they are up on stage, in front of hundreds, that this young woman and the illusionist are close enough to recognise each other - and to let fate and dangerous love take their course once again.
Where The Illusionist scores over The Prestige is that it is about a duel, not a duel between two magicians, however - with their dramatically self-cancelling equivalence in persona and function - but between a magician and a prince. (The original Millhauser story was about two magicians, and Burger may have wanted to distinguish it from the Nolan film.) This movie really is about "prestige": one is a commoner, the other an aristocrat, but Eisenheim's celebrity status easily trumps Leopold's stuffy Ruritanian style.
Leopold is nettled by the illusionist's blandly insolent refusal to reveal his secrets when he makes his condescending visits backstage, and by his own inability to guess them. He would cut his tongue out rather than humbly ask how it is done, and Eisenheim too, from his own professional pride, refuses to spill any beans, no matter how haughty or needy is the princely hinting. To his courtiers' embarrassment, Leopold has to exaggerate how amused and delighted he is by Eisenheim's tricks, simply to scotch any suggestion that the upstart illusionist is humiliating him. Rumours of his fiancee's renewed acquaintance with Eisenheim reach the princely ear, and he commands the unhappy police chief Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to crush him.
Rufus Sewell - that practised villain - expertly shows how Leopold is part political schemer, part spoilt little boy. He has become resentfully fascinated by Eisenheim's genuine popularity; he has a sort of democratic status and glitzy proto-typical modernity that Leopold cannot hope to match. And there is another reason for his hatred for the illusionist: he wants to stop the country "being run by mongrels". No overt mention is made of the illusionist's race or religion, but it is clear Leopold believes that Eisenheim, né Abramovitz, is one of these "mongrels".
Magic is always fascinating, but it is difficult to reproduce its effects in the movies because everything on screen is a kind of magic in the first place. And how do you approach the tricks themselves? Expose the secrets, and there's letdown. Don't expose the secrets, and there's frustration. So it's, well, tricky. Burger gestures at revelation, and makes you believe that, for the purposes of advancing the story, you have been told how a trick works. You have been told nothing of the kind. It's a kind of sleight-of-hand in itself, and it works reasonably well.
The goateed Edward Norton, like Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell, speaks in the default Brit accent that Hollywood considers appropriate for period-costume work - but lightly flavoured with a mitteleuropäische twang. It sounded plausible to me, and the movie adroitly sketches in the background historical detail, and makes it the setting for an elegant political parable. In its unassuming way, the film shows that reality is more mystifying than illusion.
