THE ILLUSIONIST
MOMENTUM PICTURES
RELEASED 2 March 2007
Starting with a prolonged flashback, a young boy interested in magic and his friend Sophie are separated by the girl’s rich parents. The young man leaves the village for adventures abroad, obviously realising his ability to walk around the town balancing an egg on a stick and making cards rise out of a deck will not be impressive enough to make a living.
Edward Norton plays the well-travelled adult stage magician (sporting a thick goatee and now possessing a Germanic-sounding accent, something his young self showed no trace of) known only as Eisenheim, who appears to bend nature’s laws to his will in front of awestruck crowds. The shrewd Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti, sporting a curly moustache) is fascinated with Eisenheim, and shows a liking for the magician, but owes his alleigance to the Crown. When a performance attended by the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell sporting an even curlier moustache), brings Eisenheim into contact with his young love Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), he discovers she is not only the Crown Prince’s fiancé but also a powerful tool in his plans for overthrowing the King. The Prince is certain that the illusionist is nothing more than an accomplished fraud, and attempts to debunk him more than once but is made to look foolish each time. It doesn’t help matters when he finds out that the magician is playing ‘hide the wand’ with his fiancé, who turns out to be Eisenheim’s young love. Events soon take a fatal turn for the worse.
‘The Illusionist’ starts off well, with a mood-setting score from Philip Glass and some sepia-tinted opening credits that have a silent movie feel. Eisenheim does indeed seem to have a fantastic show going, in which he can make an orange tree grow from a single pip in less than sixty seconds, physical reflections gain their independence in a floor-length mirror, and make a sword stand erect like Excalibur. Regrettably, we are never shown just how Eisenheim pulls these tricks off, and it looks very much like they are carried off with movie magic (ie special effects) rather than ‘real life’ trickery, which pretty much spoiled the illusion for me. Seeing as the tricks are all based on real tricks, it would have been more exciting if they’d recreated the tricks authentically.
Story-wise, it has an interesting mix of politics (Hapsburgs, the Secessionist movement), romance and puzzles, but a major event that happens mid-way through turns out to not be quite what it appears, which I figured out immediately, thus making half of the film a bit boring.
The stroppy Crown Prince is played with suitable impatience by Rufus Sewell, and Edward Norton appears to have a slight otherworldliness about him. Jessica Biel is okay as Sophie, not really having much to do acting-wise. Paul Giamatti is probably the pick of the bunch as the Chief Inspector.
The script has some highlights, the direction is good, and it all looks very much like 1900 Vienna (though filmed in Prague). Unfortunately, it simply lacks class, but it does stand on it’s own as a decent but fairly forgettable thriller.
THREE OUT OF FIVE