It is good for magic to be, in effect, confounding. It is not so good for a movie about magic to be confusing. Christopher Nolan, involvingly tricky with "Memento" and "Insomnia," has turned too tricky by half (or more) with "The Prestige.
" The writer and director cooks this 19th-century broth until the flavor fades. Michael Caine as Cutter, producer of magic acts in Old London, explains (twice) that "the prestige" is the closer, when the stunned audience sees the vanished magician or object return and lets loose relief in applause. But the prestige of "The Prestige" is all in its Victorian architecture, while the plot spools and spurts and tangles.
Christian Bale, looking like Tom Cruise and talking like Bob Hoskins, is Borden, a "natural" magician in long rivalry with Hugh Jackman's Angier, known as the Great Danton. Their lavish magic is fairly uninvolving, because we either see how it's done or know that it's just movie fakery. Suffering much body damage along the way, the competing Merlins even court famed physics wizard Nicola Tesla (David Bowie, grave as gravity).
Tesla's rivalry with Thomas Edison could make a far more involving film. Out near Colorado Springs, Tesla provides what must be a magical preview of "The Bride of Frankenstein." The storm of electrical bolts in his lab can't rival the overacting, so juiced by Victorian melodrama that we expect Dr.
Jekyll to turn up, wearing Mr. Hyde as a fur. Scarlett Johansson, as Bale's mistress, looks lovely but lobs remarks like, "You think you can see everything, don't you?
But the Great Danton is a blind fool!" For the first time on film, Johansson is quashed by female competition, that being Rebecca Hall as the subtle, credibly angry Mrs. Borden.
The film is a hectic hoedown of vows, denials, foreshadowings, explanations, deceits, recoveries, murky intrigues. To care about it is to believe far too much in the magic of movies. Caine, a star even doing old-guy support work, has fun welding his Cockney cadences to stuff like, "I hear he had a spot of bad luck, catching a bullet south of the river.
" Even sane Caine goes mainly down the drain.
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