"It was the look on their faces!"

One of my hobbies is to play the piano -- poorly.  For me, it's mostly a solitary activity; my playing isn't good enough to bring much pleasure to others who could just as easily listen to an MP3 of a professional musician.  But I do it to impress people, all the same -- people in the abstract.  I am my own audience when I play, and I do a rather good job of being impressed at myself.  Underneath all the rest of it -- the intellectual interest in the music itself; the kinesthetic pleasure in feeling my hands bounce across the 88 keys -- there is a little boy inside me, crowing, "Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at what I can do!"

This desperation to impress others, to see a look of wonder at the accomplishment of the difficult (or, better yet, the impossible), is at the dramatic heart of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, a film which has fascinated me for a long time.  One of the odd things about this dense, self-referential, concentrically-structured movie is that I enjoy thinking about it, and talking about it, arguably more than I enjoy watching it.

It's become a cliche to comment on the puzzle-like nature of many of Nolan's films -- particularly this, Memento, and his latest, Inception.  Often written in collaboration with Nolan's brother Jonathan, the films seem to be designed around the premise that the first viewing is only the ice-breaker, and that the most rewarding might be the second or even the third or fourth.  One of the reasons I keep rewatching The Prestige is that I keep seeing new brushstrokes, grace notes, architectural details, hidden cabinets, unglimpsed reflections.  There is an obsessive quality to the construction of this script, which reflects the obsessive nature of its dual protagonists and, presumably, of the Nolan brothers themselves.

Is Nolan a great filmmaker?  Is he one of those rare pop geniuses -- along with Hitchcock and precious few others -- who can appease the blockbuster masses while putting the full, ungloved force of his intellect onto the screen?  Truth to tell, I'm not sure.  If Howard Hawks's definition of a great film -- "three great scenes, and no bad ones" -- is accurate, then I'm not entirely sure whether The Prestige qualifies.  I wonder whether the movie has a single scene, which, viewed in isolation, brings me real viewing pleasure.  The pleasure comes after the fact, in perceiving the interconnectedness of it all, in spotting the details you missed last time around.  A friend of mine has criticized Nolan's films as essentially humorless -- exemplified by the frequent casting of the dour Christian Bale in his work.  (I don't quite agree about the humor -- I think Joe Pantoliano and Heath Ledger, through the force of their personalities if nothing else, bring some twisted levity to Memento and The Dark Knight -- but in the larger sense it is certainly true that these are not light, happy, easily-approachable films, and there's a quality of self-importance that lingers in Nolan's work).

I first read The Prestige when it was an unproduced screenplay and I was a freelance script analyst.  I didn't like it; I felt the puzzle qualities overwhelmed the dramatic interest, and the climactic revelation was predictable.  I think, at the time, I missed the point -- at least regarding twists.  There are many twists in The Prestige, some of which are easier to spot than others; Nolan himself is playing a misdirection game.  The nature of Tesla's machine, for instance, is so heavily foreshadowed that the attentive viewer will long since have figured it out before the final shot; but the corresponding twist -- regarding the Christian Bale character's secret -- flies under the radar such that I was blindsided by it even upon a second viewing of the film.  Even if you spot all the twists coming, the underlying subtleties are pleasurable to dig out -- such as, for instance, the way Bale's "alternative lifestyle" impacts the women in his orbit.  There's a whole subplot, involving Bale's wife and her observation of his tone when he says "I love you," the complete meaning of which I didn't suss out until, maybe, my third viewing.

That brain-buzz quality of Nolan's films is always there.  I saw Inception under less-than-ideal circumstances; I was practically half-asleep and struggling to keep up with the dream-world rules all the characters were breathlessly explaining with occasionally-artless expository dialogue.  I wasn't exactly enjoying myself; watching the film actually caused stress, as though I were worried there would be a quiz at the end.  And my friend's old criticisms of Nolan floated back into my mind.  Humorless?  Check.  Characters that seem more like cogs in a machine than independently-acting, emotionally complex individuals?  Check.  A vague sense as if the movie's always trying to tell you "goddamn it, this thing is a masterpiece!"  Check.  Still, I must admire Nolan's way of sneaking art-movie stylistic qualities into a mainstream summer blockbuster; that slow-motion leitmotif shot of the van endlessly plunging into the river, in particular, lingers in my mind.  The way he wrangles the concentric structure of his dreamworlds on top of the 3-act-structure of a conventional screenplay has a quality of delirious showing-off -- virtuosity for virtuosity's sake, which, though we may primly disapprove of it, retains an undeniable appeal.  And Nolan knows something about compensating for his weaknesses; if his films are indeed emotionally desaturated, as I think they are, he was very wise to cast the smoldering Marion Cotillard in the role of a character who must pull some very heavy duty, embodying love, lust, regret, longing, family, and other things besides.

There's a fugal quality to Nolan's work -- a sense in which themes, scenes, or fragments of scenes, and images, keeping popping up again and again.  The spinning top in Inception, or the two angelic children.  In The Prestige, there are the birds in the cages, which function as a small-scale metaphor for the sacrifice Hugh Jackman must ultimately make if he really wants to "get his hands dirty" and become a great magician.  There's also that bouncing red ball, passed from character to character, double to double, brother to brother, ultimately from Bale to Jackman in one of those "only-just-now-noticed" brushstrokes spotted in the latest viewing.  (Nolan, an assured visual stylist, has mostly desaturated the color palette in The Prestige, limiting it to browns, whites, and flesh tones.  All the better to set off that one single prop, the red ball?  I wouldn't put it past him.)  I don't know if Nolan is saying anything particular -- or particularly deep -- about doubles, twins, the myth of the Doppelganger -- but his imagery evokes those thoughts in us and we find ourselves ruminating after the credits roll.  That brain-buzz, again.

The other aspect of The Prestige that caught my eye on this latest viewing is what seems to be its essentially autobiographical nature.  The Jackman and Bale characters are obsessives -- people who gradually learn that they must sacrifice all other concerns if they are going to reach the pinnacle of their professions.  As someone who once aspired to be a film director, but who was not, in fact, willing to pay a very high price to achieve it, I wonder to what extent Nolan is talking about himself here.  What price did he pay to make it in the movie business, how desperately does he want to see "the looks on their faces" as the credits roll in a thousand multiplexes, and how deep is his interdependency with his screenwriter brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan?  I doubt Nolan has left any corpses in the wake of his phenomenal success, but it's hard to imagine he could have so skillfully sketched the madness driving Jackman and Bale without feeling some particle of it himself.  Or perhaps, like the twin antiheroes of this perennially (compulsively?) rewatchable movie -- oh, hell, I'll just say it -- this masterpiece -- he's simply that good an illusionist.

Comments

[Mahmood]

While I enjoyed Inception I've seen it twice I wuoldn't call it the Greatest SF Film EVAR. It's not even my favorite Christopher Nolan film, which honor goes to The Dark Knight. Still, it is, as you say, a very good flick, definitely much smarter than your standard film fare.I'm apparently a much bigger Nolan fan than you are. Even when he's not as his best, the guy puts out movies get me excited about going to the movies. I gotta tell ya, that's a vanishingly rare quality.Oh, and you should really see Memento sometime.

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