The Prestige

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige involves the secret world of magicians who obsess over and make profound sacrifices for their craft. They thrive on new ways to make the ordinary do something unexpected, and then, to the audience’s delight and wonderment, reveal their mastery over the illusion. In many ways, that’s just what Nolan does in this tale of dueling magicians at the turn of the last century. Along with his brother Jonathan Nolan, the director adapts the 1995 novel by Christopher Priest and applies the three-part structure of a magic trick defined in the story: the Pledge shows the characters and their motivations; the Turn shows them doing extraordinary, impossible things; the Prestige reveals the nature of their illusions. Yet, there’s another type of magic in the film—the same kind of magic Arthur C. Clarke wrote about in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, when he claimed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And while the illusions and science—and the science of illusions—remain central to the narrative and its complex structure, what’s at stake, even more than his characters’ fates, is whether Nolan is as accomplished a cinematic magician. His challenge to the audience—“Are you watching closely?”—rewards upon first viewing but, as with any magic trick, once you know how it’s done, the fascination dissolves.

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