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by Leonard Heldreth

 

The magic of it all
The reviews this month describe two films about Victorian magicians and examine the relationship of the top Oscar-winning film of 2007 to the film on which it is based.

The Illusionist
The Illusionist is like a fable, a fairy tale for adults. At times, obviously depending on slight of hand for its illusions, it seems at other times to flirt with the supernatural for its results. In its antique world of muted colors and textured photography, in Vienna at the turn of the century, magic is easier to believe in than it is in the modern world.
Based on a story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” by Pulizer Prize novelist Steven Millhauser, the narrative tells of the magician Eisenheim (Edward Norton) who returns to Vienna in 1900 to demonstrate his skills before an audience including Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) and his fiance Sophie (Jessica Biel).
Many years before, when Eisenheim was a boy growing up in Vienna, the son of a cabinet maker, he had fallen in love with the young Sophie, but her family kept them apart because of his low social rank. Now, when he invites a member of the audience to come onstage to participate in an illusion, the Crown Prince urges Sophie to take part, and Eisenheim realizes he still is infatuated with his childhood love.
The prince is impressed with Eisenheim and invites him to perform at the palace for his friends. Eisenheim, unfortunately, chooses the opportunity to humiliate the prince, and the prince orders his minion, Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), to expose Eisenheim as a fraud and force him to leave town.
Uhl is an amateur magician who normally would be sympathetic to a fellow magician, but he is ambitious, and orders are orders.
The townspeople, however, believe in Eisenheim, and Uhl must bide his time until he can expose the magician or fabricate a charge to exile him. In the meantime, Eisenheim and Sophie begin a secret affair that, of course, Uhl’s men discover and reveal to the prince.
When the hot-tempered Leopold confronts Sophie, the results are disastrous, and the rest of the film traces the results of that encounter. How it all works out and how illusion is separated from reality are part of the fun of the film. The last few minutes are crucial to understanding the story.
Cinematographer Dick Pope photographed the film in muted colors of green and gold, and gave it a fine-grained quality that mimics old fashioned photographs.
Transitions are sometimes done with irises rather than fades, and in the early childhood scenes, the edges of the picture are fuzzy and the colors even more muted, as if the scenes were being remembered. All of these devices add to the antique quality of the story, implying a time when magic actually could have occurred.
The sets, with Prague standing in for Vienna, are exactly right, and even the magical devices have the right period quality. Magician Ricky Jay served as technical consultant to the film, and the tricks performed onstage by Eisenheim are authentic to the period.
Norton fits the role of Eisenheim with his black eyes and goatee never revealing anything beyond a surface control until, onstage, he lets his emotions show when he calls up some spirits.
Paul Giamatti (Sideways) brings a charm and humanity to his role as the police inspector, and Biel is surprisingly good as Sophie. Sewell tends to grandstand as Leopold, but perhaps that’s how crown princes actually behave.
The Illusionist is a small film, the second directorial effort by Neil Burger, who also wrote the screenplay. Nonetheless, it succeeds as captivating entertainment in ways that blockbusters often fail. It’s charming, and even if you do guess the upbeat ending, the film is so lovely to watch that it doesn’t matter. Top

The Prestige
A much darker film than The Illusionist, both in its visuals and its ending, The Prestige also is about magicians in the Victorian period.
Director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins) co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan from a novel by Christopher Priest; the two brothers also co-wrote the screenplay for Memento, and like that earlier film, The Prestige depends on careful attention by the viewer, especially as it progresses toward its end.
Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are audience “plants” and apprentice magicians in a magic show until a death occurs on stage.
After this accident, the animosity between them grows into obsession as they develop rival magic shows, and each works to undercut the other’s show, often with physical damage to the other magician. Borden develops an onstage trick that gathers him a large audience, a trick that Angier is unable to figure out, and Angier goes to America to enlist the help of the historical inventor, Nikola Tesla (David Bowie).
Tesla creates a device that enables Angier to perform a trick more impressive than Borden’s, but there are complications, and the stakes are raised in this game of magical one-upmanship. Disguises are used throughout the film, and questions of identity are common.
Eventually, the technique behind the master trick is revealed, but it may not satisfy all viewers.
Both Bale and Jackman are excellent, as is Michael Caine in a supporting role as Cutter, a designer of tricks. Caine serves as a kind of oracle, making statements that, in retrospect, shed light on what is happening, especially in the latter part of the movie. He explains “prestige,” which, according to the novel on which the film is based, is the third part of a magic trick—the pledge, the turn and the prestige. In the prestige, that which seems to have disappeared is returned.
In some respects, the entire movie is a magic trick with further tricks wrapped inside its overall structure, and viewers will have to decide how the title fits the film.
Scarlett Johansson sashays around as magician’s assistant to both Angier and Borden, and if she plays many more of these mediocre roles, her reputation as an actress, established in Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring, will be in serious jeopardy. Rebecca Hall as Sarah Borden, Alfred’s wife, gives a much stronger performance in a supporting role. Bowie is amusing as Tesla, and Rickey Jay, technical adviser to this film as well as The Illusionist, plays a small part rather well.
The photography is nearly monochrome with lots of browns and greys to capture Victorian London, especially at night, and the claustrophobic sets add to the feeling that the audience is not seeing quite everything.
The Prestige is impressive because, like a slick magic trick, it is constructed carefully, and its timing and slight-of-hand are quite clever. On the other hand, it is not quite satisfactory because it finally draws upon science fiction rather than slight-of-hand for its effect.
Many viewers may figure out, early in the game, not only Borden’s secret but also Angier’s, although I did not—perhaps because I was not expecting science fiction.
Nonetheless, The Prestige is a fascinating film, beautifully photographed and generally well acted. And the concluding scene remains chilling, even when all is explained. Top

The Departed
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was nominated for several Oscars and won four awards—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay. As the last award indicates, The Departed essentially is a remake of a Chinese film, Infernal Affairs (available locally on DVD).
Directed by Alan Mak and Andrew Lau, Infernal Affairs was a runaway hit in Hong Kong and, like The Godfather, spawned two successive films—one that became a prequel to the first film, and one that brought back the original stars and moved the story forward. Inferal Affairs is an excellent genre film, worthy of comparison to Scorsese’s equally good film.
The plot and most of the sequences are the same in both films. Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) is an Irish-mafia crime lord in Boston.
When Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is a boy, Costello sends him home with a bag of groceries, and years later, when Sullivan graduates from the police academy, he agrees to serve Costello as a mole within the Boston police force. In return, Costello pays him well and greases the treads of his moving through the ranks.
Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who also graduates from the police academy, even though he’s Costello’s nephew. The police convince Costigan to go undercover, and through his family connections, become a mole in Costello’s syndicate. Thus, each man is constantly pretending to be something he’s not (a stressful enough situation), while constantly encountering unpredictable violence and deceit on the job (a burnout situation).
The stakes go up when each young man is assigned the task of smoking out the mole in his own organization. Violence, last-minute escapes and constant fear of discovery highlight the action as the two men move toward their final confrontation.
Infernal Affairs offers one ending and then an alternate one on the DVD, while The Departed takes the original ending of Infernal Affairs one step further before wrapping it up. Both films are fascinating and well done.
William Monahan made a number of small, significant changes when he adapted the screenplay. He combined Sullivan’s fiancee and Costigan’s psychiatrist into one character and gave her some critical action at the end, thus merging two insignificant characters into one character who was slightly less insignificant (the women are all minor figures in these films).
He also added a supporting character, Detective Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), whose cynicism and foul mouth dominate virtually every scene he’s in (he was nominated for best supporting actor).
Otherwise, the structure, plot and even revealing clues (an envelope with a crossed out word) are exactly the same. Scorsese has effectively moved the Buddhist Hong Kong setting to a Roman Catholic Boston setting (religious figures are in the background in both films) and apparently drawn some details from Boston mafia figures.
The acting generally is excellent in both films. Damon is solid as Sullivan, but DiCaprio is the star, and he handles the part well. He combines youthful vigor with an inexperience that makes his stress believable. Yet Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, Hard Boiled, Hero and 2046), who plays the parallel part in Infernal Affairs, is more mature, full of anxiety and sadness and disgust, the equal of DiCaprio in his own way. Andy Lau is at least as good as Damon, perhaps better, for he manages to convey the compromised quality of a man constantly acting like someone opposite to what he is. Wahlberg is fine as Dignam, and Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin are equally good as Inspectors Queenan and Ellerby. Ray Winstone is very convincing in the expanded role of Costello’s henchman, Mr. French.
The big question mark in The Departed is Nicholson’s acting. Some reviewers raved about it, but I felt it was over the top, a scenery-chewing performance full of Nicholson’s trademark smirks, leers and laughs with nothing new. Nicholson has proved he’s one of America’s best actors, but in this film, whether he was misguided by the director or was just hamming it up, he is a caricature of Nicholson on a bad-acting day. When Brando was tapped to play Don Corleone, he reinvented himself and gave us a character we had never seen before. In this similar part as a mafia boss, it would have been interesting to see what Nicholson could have done if he had created something new, as Brando did, instead of just dragging out his trademark routines.
Surprisingly, the Chinese film is less violent and considerably less bloody than The Departed, since Asian films often have more explicit gore, sometimes even having different versions of the films for Eastern and Western markets. In one scene, for example, Costello comes out of the backroom of a bar covered with blood up to his elbows and says something to Costigan before calling for a mop and returning to whatever grisly task he was involved in. This scene seems totally gratuitous, for we never find out what is going on, and we already know Costello is completely immoral and violent. It merely adds to the gore quotient.
The Chinese film focuses more on the shifting identity problems of the two moles, a quality which I liked, and the film paraphrases the old parable about a man wearing a mask so long that he can no longer tell what is the mask and what is himself. The two Chinese protagonists are more conflicted than their American counterparts, although in neither case are we to see them as doubles of each other
One might question why Scorsese, given his reputation, would want to remake a Chinese police and gangster film, but remember that Alan Mak and Lau were heavily influenced by American film makers like Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Michael Mann, whose visual style is reflected in Infernal Affairs. Scorsese simply brings it all back home. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa drew upon American westerns to make his classic Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Seven Samurai, all set in feudal Japan, but following traditional Western narrative and characters (Kurosawa also made a number of modern Japanese gangster films, such as High and Low and Stray Dog).
Then, Italian director Sergio Leone adapted Yojimbo back to a western setting and called it For a Fistful of Dollars. This “spaghetti” western and its sequels catapulted a young Clint Eastwood into international stardom as the serape-wearing, cigar-smoking “man with no name” and were somewhat responsible for a revival of the western.
Genre films seem to thrive on being moved to a new cultural setting and being given twists by new directors. Why shouldn’t Scorsese have his chance to say, “No, THIS is how it should be done.”
Scorsese adds some trademark humor to the film, from the opening scene when Nicholson embarrasses a teenaged girl by whispering what obviously is a lewd comment into her ear until the very last shot of an animal in front of the golden dome of Boston’s capitol. The soundtrack is excellent with the Rolling Stones and other groups,
The Departed and Internal Affairs are both excellent films that transcend their genre, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Now I need to track down parts two and three of the Chinese trilogy. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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