The Prestige

It would be criminal to reveal the secrets of Christopher Nolan’s twisty-good The Prestige. A brief sketch of the plot will tell you that this film follows the stories of competing magicians Alfred “The Professor” Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert “The Great DAnton” Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Cutter (Michael Caine) the “illuengineer” who connects the two men. Set in the late 1800s when magic was apparently all the rage on London’s stages, the film traces the rise and fall of each of the magicians after the tragic death of Angier’s wife – which may or may not have been as a result of Borden’s arrogance – on stage during another magician’s act. The plot, though, is pretty much immaterial as the setting of the world of stage magic is but a backdrop for Nolan’s other concerns: the nature of truth and reality.

Carrying through the theme of what is real and what isn’t that Nolan explored through the distortions of memory in Momento, The Prestige looks at the nature of reality and truth through the lens of self deception and secrets and how those two things change the nature of reality and twist the fabric of truth throwing you into a world, the real world, where something that is absolutely true one day may be equally untrue the next.

Cutter tells us, more than once, that “Every great trick consists of three acts…” 1) The Pledge where the magician shows you something ordinary; 2) The Turn: the magician makes this ordinary something do something extraordinary; and 3) The Prestige: the part that involves the risk, the danger, and something that you’ve never seen before.

But it’s what Cutter tells us about “The Turn” that is really at the heart of this film: if you’re looking for the secret but you probably won’t see it. The film’s implicit message is that you don’t see it because you don’t really want to. The audience wants to be fooled; they want the reward of the prestige, the shock, the something completely different. It is this capacity for willful self-deception that lies at the blackest heart of this film, and a black heart it is.

For this, for being a twisty-good film geared toward an adult, thinking mind I give The Prestige 4 out of 5 popcorns.

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