The Prestige. Image courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures.
It is my belief that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s best film, and here is why. The convoluted sequencing of the narrative jumping around in time and everything actually works, for perhaps the only time in his post-Memento filmography, to complement the plot and enhance it. Nolan, and his fiendishly idiotic brother, drive me crazy by insisting that every film they make must also be a study in nonlinear storytelling. Rarely is this actually justified by the story they are telling. In fact, it usually just smacks of gimmickry. Why did Dunkirk need to have three story-lines interlaced through time like some kind of illusory Joycean fever dream? It didn’t. Why did Season 2 of Westworld need to have that insanely complex structure? It didn’t.
But in The Prestige, you can much more easily make the argument that the narrative complexity was necessary for the story they are telling – because it mimics the structure of a magic trick. Michael Caine even describes what we are about to see in the opening monologue, when he explains the anatomy of a magic trick:
“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge.’ The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called ‘The Turn.’ The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige.’”
The structure of the film hews closely to this description, setting in motion this epic rivalry between two magicians who will do anything – literally anything – to best one another and claim the glory and adulation of the public. The whole time, we the audience are looking for the secrets behind their tricks, but in another sense part of the fun of this film’s structure is that we also want to be fooled. When the very final Prestige is revealed, it’s a real mind-trip and raises quite a few existential questions in the process. Is Jackman bringing anything back? Or is he killing himself every time he performs the trick?
The acting is of course amazing. The film is decked out in gorgeous period detail, and is made with unimpeachable technical skill. But the convoluted narrative structure, the doubling, the mind games the film plays with the audience – they are actually earned, and crucially they make the film better. So often the Nolans, both of them, mess with time and structure for no clear purpose other than to lend their work some kind edginess I guess. But in The Prestige it’s all working toward a higher purpose, and I think it’s easily Christopher Nolan’s best film to date.
