He had a new trick.
Was it good?
It was the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.
So, I guess I am gonna do it. I’m gonna try to actually write about my feelings about The Prestige. I’ve talked off the cuff about this movie a lot over the years, but I’ve never actually given it a full, structured review and I’m going to try to do that. But, my goodness, fifteen years later, The Prestige is just still a heck of a movie to try to talk about. Let me just talk a bit without spoilers and then maybe go behind spoiler tags at the end.
The central story hook is one that you could see falling flat on its face as easily as you could see it succeeding. A pair of stage magicians engage in a game of oneupmanship over the course of several years? I mean, okay. But this seemingly very simple premise becomes the foundation of a movie that, in my opinion, really does succeed in every way imaginable. The headline is obviously the puzzle-box structure, the twist-upon-twist mystery of the movie, and Nolan pulls that off to perfection. I’m going to make a very broad and bold statement, but I honestly think that it’s true: The Prestige utilizes the non-chronological method of storytelling better than any movie I’ve ever seen. I mean, I guess I mean two things by that. First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie so completely unfettered by chronology. The movie might just leap back and forth between two scenes numerous times. Or it might jump into a scene for just a few seconds. It might leap forward or backwards by YEARS with no real indication of such a jump, sometimes, again, for only a few moments. The script is absolutely free, able to make time jumps in a completely instinctual, thematic way, tying moments that are separated by years to each other because of an emotional or thematic resonance. There’s simply no allegiance to straight chronology and it’s exhilarating. The second thing is even more amazing, which is that, despite this or perhaps because of it, every jump FEELS right. These jumps are never jarring even when, as they usually are, they’re just straight cuts from one shot to the next and you’re never lost in the chronology. It truly feels like the border of non-chronological storytelling in terms of just how free it is and yet it’s also entirely consistent, never jarring and always clear from a logistical point of view. It is, of course, not always clear from a plot perspective, which brings me to the next thing that I guess really works here.
Like I say, the puzzle box aspect of this is always going to be the top line of the story. But I’m baffled by people who say The Prestige leaves them emotionally cold. This is, in my opinion, Nolan’s saddest movie, his most tragic story. It’s the story of these men who are driven by obsession and hate and pride to destroy each other and themselves and, since they take their sweet time doing it, to leave a trail of collateral damage in their wake in terms of the other lives they destroy. I’ve seen some people say that they find the movie cold because the main characters are so unlikable and that’s more fair to me than saying that the story itself isn’t emotional. It’s actually quite bold, making the main characters of the film so undeniably reprehensible and in Bale & Jackman, Nolan has the collaborators who aren’t afraid to lean into the negative sides of their characters.
Bale’s performance is absolutely a thing of beauty; it’s a performance that has to work on multiple levels. It needs to feel real and believable the first time you watch the movie; and it needs to feel real and believable the second time you watch the movie. And, without spoilers, if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. And the amazing thing is that it does work both of those times. The script never cheats and neither does Bale; on a second viewing, you realize that there’s never actually a question in your mind about the central question of Bale’s character. In every scene, you know the answer because it’s actually there, in the script and in the performance. That’s quite astonishing. Jackman is also extremely good. I first noticed Jackman in X-Men, of course, but even on into X2, I still found him to be, while an entertaining Wolverine, not an actor of much nuance or depth. He was fine for what those first two X-Men movies asked him to do, but not much more in my opinion. The Prestige was the first time I remember thinking that he was giving a great performance; and he’s continued to improve of course into a really fine actor. But the fact that he’s able to hold his own opposite Bale’s incredibly committed and layered performance is high praise; his performance is the lesser of the two if you make me pick, but I think it genuinely is an excellent performance. He rises to the material in a way that I didn’t expect at the time and, looking back on his performance after having seen him do things like Logan and Les Mis, you can see that he’s genuinely stepped up to the next level in The Prestige.
The supporting cast is equally excellent. Nolan’s filmography is absolutely lousy with Michael Caine being entertaining and excellent, but I think his character here is the richest and most complex of the characters he’s played for Nolan over the years and his performance is excellent. Scarlett Johansson is, I think, underused and not as good as I would have liked her to be, but this is part of Nolan’s problem with female characters: she’s the most underwritten character in the movie in my opinion. Rebecca Hall, on the other hand, takes a somewhat underwritten character and absolutely breathes life into it with a fully committed performance. Andy Serkis gives a witty and clever performance in a small role. And, yes, of course, this is where you’re headed when you talk about The Prestige’s cast: David Bowie is Nikola Tesla as no one else ever could be. He embodies, at least, the pure myth of Tesla, if not the man, which is what Nolan is interested in. His introduction, striding out of a cloud of pure energy, is one of the greatest character introductions in Nolan’s filmography and Bowie is wonderful in the film, bringing an energy (sorry) to the movie that no one else quite does, imbuing the dark and nihilistic story with actual wonder whenever he’s on screen.
Thematically, the movie’s a winner too. It’s a movie about magic, but also about entertainment in general and beyond that it’s a movie about art. It’s a movie about tricks that wants to be a trick itself and is one, a masterful one. But it has a lot to say about destructive behavior, about the two-fold nature of humanity, about the difference between the real and the fake, between the inventor and the showman, between magic and science. The script is peppered with lines and moments that say something deeper than they appear to on first glance, quite often about the plot, but also about the larger themes and ideas at work here. And, while there’s certainly spectacle at play here, I think is Nolan’s last film that one could even halfway say isn’t a blockbuster. It has scope and sprawl and a grand sense of itself, but it’s also a personal story, driven primarily by characters having character based dilemmas. It isn’t exactly small, but it’s the closest thing we get post Insomnia.
Anyway, I don’t think I need to really talk spoilers after all; I was able to say most of what I wanted to say by talking in general terms. It’s a true masterpiece and, after the solid, but also pretty straightforward, Batman Begins, it confirmed for that Nolan needed to ditch the comic book movies and just do his own thing, so I got set up for a pretty good trick right there, didn’t I, not to spoil my opinion on The Dark Knight. I think it was Ken who said not that long ago that he’d love to just essentially gift Nolan a sci-fi masterpiece, so he would quit trying to make one (Inception, Interstellar, Tenet) and go back to more interesting smaller films. Well, things are worse than that, because, in my opinion, Nolan has a sci-fi masterpiece and it’s this movie; I know some people feel cheated by the “genre-shift” into sci-fi, but, honestly . . . those hats should have given it away – of course, they didn’t on my first viewing either. The Prestige is one of the movies that keeps bouncing around on my ranking of Nolan films, always bouncing up into the number one slot every time I see it and then back down a slot after I rewatched Memento, etc. It’s tough to rank, tough to categorize, but a joy to experience and, after all the sound and fury and dream-trips and time travel and super-villains and World War . . . darned if I don’t think this really is his best. Of course, like I say, I just saw it; things can always change. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a masterful script marries a puzzle box plot with deep thematic resonance and, boosted by great performances, achieves the level of grand tragedy; a magic trick for the ages. 4 stars.