Audiences Share Pleasure In Being Duped

The Age

Thursday March 1, 2007

Jake Wilson

THE ILLUSIONIST

3/5 (M) Selected cinemas

IT MIGHT be sheer coincidence that over the last few months, two movies about magicians have arrived in our cinemas: firstly Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, and now The Illusionist, written and directed by the lesser-known Neil Burger.

Or rather, it might be a coincidence if the films themselves didn't indicate otherwise. What Nolan and Burger suggest is that the magician may yet come to replace the serial killer as an exemplary symbol of current confusions: a man (always a man) who stands at the crossroads between high art and pop culture, esoteric wisdom and shameless trickery, the pagan past and the postmodern future, madness and reason, life and death.

In all these respects he can be considered a stand-in for any kind of storyteller whose feats of imagination are also bare-faced lies. It's no accident that both these films are set at roughly the moment when cinema was invented. Burger and Nolan imply that cinematic narrative is the ultimate magic trick, as they conjure up phantoms, and encourage their viewers to enjoy being fooled.

On its own terms, The Illusionist is a plush yet attractively modest entertainment, straightforwardly plotted and easy to digest. By comparison, Nolan's film might look like an overwrought pulp folly, with its convoluted plot and its intimations of horror. Still, watching these two films in the order they have been released in Australia is a little like ordering an appetiser after the main course.

There are two magicians (at least) at the centre of The Prestige, and their rivalry allows Nolan to toy with the grand romantic myth of the artist as a tragic figure obliged to make a deal with the devil. Ultimately, the characters played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale turn out to be their own greatest illusions: hollow men who are shadowed by doppelgangers (not least each other), and who sacrifice all moral principles in order to outdo each other in feats of trickery.

By contrast, The Illusionist has only one magician hero: Eisenheim (Edward Norton), a mysterious figure who appears out of nowhere to become the toast of turn-of-the-century Vienna. His success is so great that it brings him into conflict with the local authorities, particularly when he rekindles a love affair with his childhood sweetheart Sophie (Jessica Biel), now the chosen bride of the vapid and sadistic Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell).

Burger deliberately keeps us at a distance from Eisenheim, and for much of the film Norton does little to suggest what might be going through the character's mind. On stage, he's soft-spoken and faintly ironic, tossing out rhetorical questions to the audience and performing marvels casually in the middle of sentences.

Unlike The Prestige, The Illusionist is hardly at all interested in the mechanics that lie behind stage illusion, partly because much of the plot depends on the possibility that Eisenheim might have genuine occult powers, and partly because Burger himself relies so plainly on special effects achieved by computer.

Rather than conceptual puzzles, Eisenheim's tricks are ornamental caprices of a kind that could only be achieved in reality by a visitor from Fairyland. Playing cards levitate, a handkerchief is borne aloft by a pair of pale-blue butterflies, and an orange tree sprouts from a pot within a few seconds, like the Tree of Life in Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain - in a sense, another magician film, with a mad scientist protagonist who acquires multiple personalities as he strives for godlike power.

But rather than demonstrating the costs of a quest for glory, The Illusionist mostly places the viewer in the position of a mystified onlooker. In this sense, our representative on screen would have to be Eisenheim's would-be nemesis Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), a man who couldn't dissemble if he tried, who sweats honesty from every pore, and who congratulates himself on possessing all the virtues of a solid bourgeois citizen, with a private imaginative streak to boot.

With his upright posture and wandering goldfish eyes, Uhl clearly enjoys standing on his dignity while on duty, but easily becomes distracted when he gets a chance to probe into Eisenheim's professional secrets. When he's shown how to perform a simple trick, he can't resist repeating the gestures he's been taught, like a child delighted with a new toy.

Giamatti excels at conveying states of mild physical discomfort, and The Illusionist allows him to do this in a playful way that owes something to the pantomime conventions of silent cinema, yet helps the film keep its feet on the ground. Placed against an operetta backdrop and surrounded by airy games with illusion, Giamatti's body retains its weight: there's no possibility that Uhl might suddenly disappear into thin air.

The battle between Eisenheim and Uhl, who stand respectively for genius and common sense, is easily the most suggestive aspect of The Illusionist. The romance between Eisenheim and Sophie comes a long way behind. A prize to be lost or won, Sophie herself is almost completely without personality, as the film seems to acknowledge when she's literally reduced to a depthless image or an insensible prop.

The stiff love scenes follow romantic convention exactly as they might in Uhl's imagination - which is possibly where they occur, given that he serves from time to time as our narrator. It's also just possible that the ending of the film is simply Uhl's fantasy, but thoughtful viewers will bear in mind that it's no more fictional than anything else they've just witnessed.

At any rate, the real pay-off of The Illusionist has little to do with its twist ending (not hard to predict). What counts are Uhl's reactions, which are all that the most ambitious artist-magician could hope for. Accepting defeat, he displays a humble generosity that a critic might almost feel ashamed not to share. He doesn't just smile, he positively beams, when he realises exactly how he's been duped.

SCREEN MAGICIANS

? The Magician (1958): Set in 19th-century Stockholm, Ingmar Bergman's allegory about the conflict between art and reason pits a travelling mesmerist (Max von Sydow) against a man of science (Gunnar Bjornstrand).

? Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974): Magic is everywhere in Jacques Rivette's great comedy, with Dominique Labourier as a librarian who studies witchcraft and Juliet Berto as one of the few professional female conjurers in cinema.

? F for Fake (1974): Director Orson Welles performs some sleight of hand tricks while introducing his slippery "documentary" about a legendary art forger and other hoaxes.

? New York Stories (1989): In one segment of this anthology film, a magician makes Woody Allen's mother disappear. Reportedly, Woody plays the magician in his upcoming Scoop.

? Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989): Arthur Penn's last film to date stars the eponymous pair of gonzo magicians, whose sadistic games with the audience anticipate Wes Craven's Scream series.