REVIEW - The Illusionist (2006)

You know how it is... wait ages for a period piece centred on a turn of the century stage magician and then two turn up at once. Appearing only a few months behind Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige comes Neil Burger’s loose adaptation of a short story written by Steven Millhauser. Despite boasting some proper stars in decent performances, The Illusionist never quite manages to become the film it so clearly wants to be as interesting themes and secondary plots struggle to emerge from behind the voluminous ball gown of the film’s misfiring central love story.

As the film begins we are introduced to two teenagers. One, the poor son of a Jewish cabinet maker, the other a beautiful female aristocrat. Intrigued by his nascent conjuring skills, the girl quickly falls for the boy. However, after being discovered sneaking out, the girl is forbidden from seeing her love until she meets him again fifteen years later on stage. Now known as Eisenheim the illusionist (Norton), the boy has travelled the world and is now celebrated in his home town. The girl is now Duchess von Teschen (Biel) and is said to be the intended of drunken sadist, Prince Leopold (Sewell), heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Predictably, the Prince becomes jealous and there ensues a bitter rivalry as Leopold tries to shut the Illusionist down while Eisenheim makes his intended disappear from beneath his nose, relieving him not only of his political aspirations but his life as well.

The film is structured around the melodramatic relationship between Sophie and Eisenheim, which was always a risky move as neither Leopold nor Sophie feature in the original story. This should be immediately evident as Norton’s inscrutably intense conjuror and Giamatti’s ambitious but honourable Chief Inspector Uhl are streets ahead of these late additions.

Sewell reprises his turn as an upper class rotter last seen in 2001’s A Knight’s Tale but is so monstrously cruel and jealous the first time he appears on screen, he has nowhere to go with the role. Nor does he spend very much time on-screen with Norton making their supposed rivalry seem abstract and unconvincing. Meanwhile, Biel’s Sophie is little more than a MacGuffin for the boys to fight over. Utterly insipid and totally passive she does not, for even a moment, seem like the kind of woman you would be willing to risk your life for. Admittedly, Biel is not helped by Burger’s decision to keep much of Sophie’s involvement with Eisenheim secret until the grand reveal but even in the scenes where the lovers are on screen together, the lack of chemistry or tension is almost palpable.

The fact that the main plot is so completely unconvincing is deeply disappointing as in the remaining kernel of the short story there is much of interest. Firstly, we have the real duel between Eisenheim and Uhl. As an illusionist, Eisenheim makes his money hiding things from view. As a policeman, Uhl makes his living uncovering things that others would hide. The two characters are bound together by their intelligence and their lowly class origins, but it is the setting for this duel that is most interesting. Set in the same historical period as John Osborne’s play Colonel Redl, The Illusionist touches not only upon the struggle of exceptional men to overcome their class origins but also a cultural climate where, on the cusp of the modern world, the people of Vienna are too modern to be in the thrall of priests but not yet modern enough to be free of the desire to believe in life after death. This strange cultural climate gave birth not only to magical orders such as Crowley’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn but also the rise of Madame Blavatsky’s spiritualist Theosophy. All of these real historical and social phenomena are touched upon by the script (aside from Eisenheim’s obvious Jewishness) but because of the needs of the melodramatic central plot, they are never allowed to blossom fully into anything interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is the treatment of magic. Unlike The Prestige’s super-science/magic, the Illusionist’s tricks are supposedly more a matter of skilful engineering than supernatural powers. However, what is strange is that all of the tricks are CGI. Burger makes no attempt to explain how any of the tricks might work or even to demonstrate what goes on just out of sight. All we have to go on is the glimpse of a workshop, a set of blueprints and Eisenheim’s assurance that this is trickery. Seeing as the film effectively gulls, in a manner reminiscent of Brian Singer’s The Usual Suspects, the audience into believing that one of the characters is dead and then raised up by Eisenheim’s powers, this places the audience in the rather strange position of watching magic tricks that couldn’t be replicated without the use of CGI but which we are told “are just illusions”. However, because these tricks are only possible using CGI then Eisenheim might as well be using magic... so it is not clear what is to be gained dramatically or conceptually from suggesting that he a) is tricking everyone and b) has not actually raised his lover from the dead. Ontologically speaking, this is most confusing.

Comments

[gabe]

Utterly insipid and totally passive she does not, for even a moment, seem like the kind of woman you would be willing to risk your life for.

Yeah, but have you LOOKED at her?

You've at least convinced me to not watch the movie, eye candy or no.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Meh... my interest in squeaky under-weight blonds is conspicuous by its absence.

To be fair, it wasn't entirely her fault in this case as her part was essentially just a macguffin but she hardly smolders with sensuality does she?

[Lee]

Hmm, Biel isn't really a blonde. And I wouldn't call her underweight either...she's actually pretty buff.

As for the magic tricks in this movie, I've read that they actually used as little CGI as possible - Ricky Jay was the magic supervisor for the film and wanted to make the tricks as 'period authentic' as possible. Not only that but Norton was trained in sleight-of-hand so that they wouldn't have to use effects for his sleighting scenes.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

She looks underweight to me... she's what, a size 4 maybe?

As for the tricks, slight of hand is one thing but the big tricks simply can't be done without CGI. I think the period detailing is slightly off as the tricks are presented in such a way as to illicit from modern audiences the same reaction it would have gotten from audiences at the time.

So it's a real orange tree that sprouts from the pot and it's real holographic spectors that walk about the place. It's not good stage magic it's CGI.