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Film
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The Illusionist
If you can put aside for a moment the inaccuracy of the trailer and the imposing shadow of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, this indie is well worth checking out.
Monday, August 21, 2006 at 10:00 AM
By Kevin Biggers
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Yari Film Group
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Writer-director Neil Burger
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In preparing for The Illusionist - a film starring Ed Norton as a mystifying magician in love - I made a mistake. It’s the same mistake I make with many films: I viewed the trailer multiple times.
For most filmgoers, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. But for me, too often, my purview becomes blurry, my mind jogs onto an unstoppable treadmill of thought, exercising itself into expectations, predictions, assumptions, and, yes – gasp! - pre-screening criticisms. But this wasn’t the worst part in this case.
The worst part was when I, by happenstance while IMDB surfing, came upon Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a much ballyhooed (and probably deservingly so) film about two rival magicians, one who’s a master of his craft and the other who performs real magic, two traits conflated into Norton’s magician in The Illusionist.
And the problem of course, is that when it comes to comparing Nolan with any other director, nine times out of ten, the Nolan pic will command more excitement, a theory only exacerbated by the fact that the trailer for The Prestige is a shoe-in for the best trailer of the year, garnering this encomium from its ability to apprise the viewers of the basic plot and characters while engendering an exhilarating gust of excitement, yet
giving away nothing seemingly ruinous.
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Yari Film Group
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A master big screen illusionist
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On the other end, The Illusionist trailer hints at a film with epic scope, with a love story that could alter the fate of an empire, intimating a dark secret that could easily confuse viewers into thinking it’s a horror film. This is all wrong.
Yes, the story deals tangentially with the Austrian Empire; yes, there’s a love story present that affects the direction of this empire; and yes, Norton’s magician dabbles in
supernatural, borderline spine-tingling machinations. But to say these things stand at the forefront of the story is wrong.
The film is based on Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Steven Millhauser’s short story, Eisenheim the Illusionist, which centers on Eisenheim (Norton), a mysterious and at times tenebrous magician who is able to perform mesmerizing and putatively impossible tricks. More so, in fact, than a regular magician, for while a regular magician’s tricks rest almost visibly on a thick sleeve or trick door, Eisenheim’s tricks seem spawned from a child’s imagination, where the concept of time and space is a mere
whimsical thought in the face of magic.
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Yari Film Group
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Pallid co-star Jessica Biel
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At first, all is well: there are large crowds, rave reviews and big profits satisfy Eisenheim and his manager. However, when Eisenheim, during a show, comes face to face with his childhood love, the soon-to-be princess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), he sets forth into a dangerous game, one that leads him first into the good graces of the volatile Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) and then near the throes of imprisonment and possible execution, after the Prince’s loyal police chief, Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) discovers Einsenheim and Sophie’s plan to flee Vienna.
So if this isn’t an epic love story or horror film, then what is it… A straightforward dramatic love story tinged as a period piece? Absolutely not.
The Illusionist, much to my surprise, is first and foremost a mystery, though script readers would probably attach the supernatural thriller or psychological thriller nomenclature to it. So I guess, for the sake of not looking like a chump, I’ll call it a mysterious film.
Whatever the genre, writer and director Neil Burger, in his second go behind the camera, deftly guides the plot elements of story as if it were a Chandler mystery. We have mysterious characters with unknown motives and mysterious plot elements that don’t seem to add up. We also have the expectation, going into the last fifteen minutes, that there will be a satisfying resolution to this madness. And Burger delivers.
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Yari Film Group
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From swimming pool to period
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Even the most incessantly inquisitive will experience a degree of shock during
the last fifteen minutes of the film. And only the greatest cynic will call these last fifteen minutes contrived or farfetched, because after all, Eisenheim is no standard, backyard birthday party or even Vegas strip magician. Eisenheim is somewhat fantastical, a lugubrious Willy Wonka, yet so trenchantly anchored in humanly emotions and affectations that it’s impossible to not conclude at the end that this works.
A large heap of the plaudits should and shall directed towards Norton who, in his magician scenes, bleeds his character, in a viscerally captivating way, as we watch a stream of burgundy ooze from his eyes or burst out of his veins, to the point where Norton vanishes in the wake of Eisenheim. This is especially evident, watching the magician turn from suave, show-stopping magician to a pale, emaciated man whose life
depends on one last great magic trick.
And in this, Norton does what he does best: he frightens us. Whether he’s a skinhead smashing the heel of his boot into the back of a thug’s head or a convicted drug dealer
cursing off all the inequities of the world in a bathroom mirror, or even an insomniac writhing on his kitchen table with acid on his hand, Norton frightens us. He uses his steel-tipped eyes, razor-sharp brows or ghostly pallid skin to project himself as if he was six inches from our face.
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Yari Film Group
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A solid Sewell
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As Eisenheim, Norton’s expressions alone throw us into a labyrinth of second-guessing. Can we trust what we see? Is he really in trouble? How is he doing this? To just imagine him as a detective with Tourette’s syndrome in Jonathan Lethem’s hopefully upcoming Motherless Brooklyn is chill-inducing.
Yet maybe Norton overplays his hand, not to reference Rounders’ Worm.
Maybe Norton became so obsessed, so perfection-minded, so ambitious with playing Eisenheim that he neglected or failed to pay enough attention to his role as lover. Because if there’s an immediately discernable flaw in the film, it’s the love story, not so much its standard, yawn-worthy strands but more in its inability to emote any real moiety of pathos.
The easy target is Jessica Biel, who usually gives noticeably uneven performances, something which could only be exacerbated by her shared scenes with our generation’s Brando, right? Yet dare I say this is not entirely Biel’s fault. Yes, Biel remains
largely distant and inaccessible, and, yes, she still lacks the confident screen presence to make Sophie a salient force in the film. Yet it’s Norton who neglects his role as the fiery romantic. And it’s Burger who doesn’t give enough time for the romance to breathe, to take on a salient shape in the realm of the film.
One, in retort, may say that any additional time devoted to the love story could sully the pace of the mystery. Yet the mystery - I mean - mysterious film’s twists and turns at
times need pathos enhancement that a convincing love story could have cultivated.
Nonetheless, The Illusionist is a very good film, thanks also to Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell, who give very good performances as, respectively, the serious but
stumped detective and the impish and grating prince. It’s nice to see Giamatti distance himself from Sideways sesquipedalian wino with roles like Cinderella Man’s Joe Gould and this film’s Uhl. He pensively and lambently occupies a significant portion of the film with the sort of three-dimensional vulnerability that you’d expect.
| In the same way, Sewell is nothing short of precise as the venomous prince. When I think of Rufus Sewell, I generally think of an actor presented with supporting roles, so substantial, that they tend to make or break the film. In this film, along with several if not all of his performances, we watch as he methodically takes his characters to a
certain level of exactness, ineluctably rendering acknowledgments that generally start with, “Sewell’s perfect for this role.”
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So, with all this going right, maybe I’m giving Burger too much credit when I call his directing “deft.” But then again, I’ve seen indies like this before, where a film with a notable and experienced cast and a seemingly exciting story falls flat on its face, slipping from the novice hands of some walleyed director. This does not happen with Burger.
From start to finish, you get the sense that someone is definitely in control, that each scene takes on its intended shape, that each word or expression or occurrence was guided by a confident director. Even when you feel the story slipping - which does occur halfway through - Burger rips your eyes away from any possible digressions and averts them back to the movie, where he shows you just how savvy a director he is.
In the end, Burger creates a film that he can call his own and that we, or at least I, could call an entertaining and encapsulating experience. Now if he could only have re-edited the trailer…
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