The Prestige (2006)

Premise: Apprentices Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) are competitive but friendly. An accident during Milton (Ricky Jay)'s magic show leads to a death, and their competition turns to rivalry. Angier's the better showman, but Borden's the better magician by far, forcing Angier to wonder if Borden has gone beyond tricks and illusions. Angier's obsessive need to beat Borden feeds Borden's own obsession, consuming both of them until it leads to murder.

Co-writer and director Christopher Nolan is a prima ballerina. His moves on the screen are so graceful, so delicate, and so disarming that you are hardly watching a movie at all. I was about 40 minutes in before I even remembered it was a movie. He and his brother, Jonathan, composed the screenplay, based on Christopher Priest's novel, in the three acts of a magic trick: The Pledge - the magician shows you something ordinary. In this case, it's a trial. The Turn - the magician makes the ordinary extraordinary. Film making is magic in and of itself, and here the magic comes from making you believe. Obviously the suspension of disbelief is required in all storytelling, but the Nolans go beyond that. They don't care about your disbelief because they do a lot more than get you to suspend it momentarily - they get you to leave it behind entirely.

Getting a convincing performance out of Bale is hardly extraordinary. Borden isn't one person but a plethora - a magician, a showman, a husband, a father, a lover, a friend, and an enemy. The characters are a lot to keep track of, and Bale's best moments are when the discrete personae begin blur and overlap. He never plays one emotion without the undercurrent of at least one more, if not two, and it's in that conflict that he achieves the extraordinary. He doesn't have to will you to believe in him as a great magician - he is one.

Perhaps the more extraordinary feat from C. Nolan comes then in Jackman's performance. It's not that I didn't believe that Jackman was a good actor before. It's just that he's not had much of a chance to prove it. Here he takes on a plethora of roles as well, but there's an emotion that each must possess and that Jackman embodies with a ferocity never before seen: hate. Hate is a complex human emotion, and a lot more goes into it that simply intense dislike. There's jealousy and admiration and loathing, and all of it is only a split hair away from love. I was awestruck by how much Jackman put into this role.

Another extraordinary feat was making me maybe, a little bit like Piper Perabo. She's not in the movie for long, but she didn't annoy me once, so I have to credit where it is due. Where isn't it due? Scarlett Johansson. What was that crap? I can get past her Gwyneth Paltrow English accent, and there's still nothing to get to. Her husky voice and opaque sexiness mean nothing if there isn't something behind them. And there wasn't. None of the love or hate or betrayal she should have felt as a pawn of these men was there. Instead Johansson was the apotheosis of John Berger's comment that "Men act. Women appear."

It certainly didn't help that Rebecca Hall, as Sarah, created a complete and compelling character. Or that Michael Caine delighted as Cutter, an engineer and inventor who made Angier's illusions possible. Or that David Bowie made quite an impressive entrance as Nikola Tesla.

David Julyan's score gives the movie just the right atmosphere of deception, as does Wally Pfister's compelling cinematography.

It is the third act, the Prestige, that gets you. The Turn on its own isn't enough. It's clever and nice, but figuring it out is too easy. No, the Prestige is the twist that makes you believe. The Prestige is the moment you realize the ordinary thing you thought you saw at the beginning was never ordinary. A