Prestidigitation

Christopher Priest is one of the UK's most important and brilliant novelists, responsible for a whole raft of fictions that probe the nature of reality and our relationship with it in the most astonishing and subtle ways, some of them genuinely disturbing. Were it not that being taught in schools undermines every narrative genius -- witness those generations trained to loathe Jane Austen and the Brontes -- I'd say that any vaguely literate teenager should be force-fed The Glamour and especially The Affirmation right this minute. Some of Priest's work is no fun at all -- Fugue for a Darkening Island, for example, from the early 1970s, is an unflinching portrait of British racism under desperate circumstances that seems ever more resonant -- but often he manages to make insane philosophical complexity remarkably accessible. His recent off-kilter alternative reality story The Separation won plaudits, but perhaps most readable and attractive of all his books is The Prestige, a briliiantly sustained sleight of hand set in the world of late-Victorian theatrical magic. Its tawdry glamour and lively melodrama make for an intoxicating blend.

Given which appraisal, what are we to make of that novel's Hollywood transformation at the hands of Memento and Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan?

Let's deal with the simplicities first: Jackman and Bale acquit themselves excellently, while Michael Caine steals the movie out from under them both. Being reconfigured as a murder mystery serves the story just fine, and other changes to the material -- most notably the nature of the prestige materials -- manage to present some of the book's rather subtle themes in a satisfactorily cinematic way.

More difficult to judge, knowing the magicians' secrets in advance, is the success or otherwise of the illusion entire. The movie expends, to my mind, altogether too much effort to hide the nature of the various illusions, and in doing so at least marginally undermines the bitter ironies contained in each. How does an innocent viewer pick up on such things? Does s/he find the resolution as surprising as it is clearly designed to be? Are the secrets well kept? And do the corresponding cruelties resonate with the necessary awfulness?

I have no idea.

It is impossible to approach such a film in a state different from one's actual own, so all I can say is it worked great for me. Although rather over-extended in the middle act, The Prestige easily makes up for that in its finale, revealing the awful sacrifices of both protagonists with admirable force. Despite a happy ending of sorts this is definitely not a happy film; crueller, I think, than the book.

It pretty much does Chris Priest justice; and who can have hoped for that?
Posted by matt at November 9, 2006 10:47 PM