Movie Review: The Illusionist

Neil Burger's The Illusionist is a very pleasant surprise. Hollywood often comes out with two films simultaneously that deal with same things. Deep Impact and Armageddon, and the like. This year, it's The Illusionist and The Prestige, both period pieces centered on magicians. I saw them both this week. I expected both to be decent but The Prestige to be better, given that is from Chris Nolan. Unfortunately Nolan's work just proves that he is, in fact, mortal. But The Illusionist holds up, and is a totally captivating and entertaining film.

Set in Vienna circa 1900, the film tells the story of Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) and his romance with Sophie (Jessica Biel), a Hungarian duchess betrothed to Leopold (Rufus Sewel), crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two were childhood friends, whose friendship and romance flew in the face of convention as she was from nobility and he was a peasant. Try as they might, they cannot buck the social pressures of the day, and Sophie is eventually taken away. That's the backstory to what happens in the film, which takes place 15 years later.

Eisenheim has become a magician with a great following. His tricks are so astounding, his mystified audiences are convinced he has supernatural powers, though he assures them (when needed) that everything is just an illusion. One night, Leopold is in the audience and volunteers his beloved to participate in a trick. Eisenheim immediately recognizes Sophie, and she eventually realizes who he is and their love is rekindled. Later, Eisenheim is brought to meet the prince, who invites him to the castle for a private performance and asks for something special. Eisenheim muses that he will make the prince disappear.

Instead, Eisenheim takes a cut at the prince by improvising a trick based on the legend of Arthur. Taking the prince's sword, he challenges members of the audience to prove their worth by lifting the sword. None can, of course. But when Leopold comes to reclaim his sword, Eisenheim doesn't end the trick right away and the prince is left struggling to lift the sword too, while members of the audience joke that he must be unworthy of the throne. Leopold immediately decides the magician must be shut down, and sends his lapdog, Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to do so.

One of Leopold's failings is his habit of beating women. He is rumored to have even thrown one off a roof to cover up the bruises from a beating. When Sophie leaves Leopold, he kills her. Everyone suspects the prince, but few are willing to say so publicly. This includes Uhl, who by his own admission is not totally corrupt, and cannot help but notice a few clues to the identity of the killer.

Eisenheim takes the death of his lover hard, and eventually transforms his act into one of conjuring spirits for the audience. One of those spirits is, of course, Sophie, which infuriates Leopold even further and demands again that Eisenheim be shut down. Unfortunately, the conjurer himself appears to have become a spirit, and the police are unable to arrest him.

So, there it is. The story of the film. Or is it? I won't answer, but I will point out the name of the film is The Illusionist.

Everyone involved in the film gives a solid performance. The acting is uniformly good. That may come as a surprise in reference to Biel, but she holds her own in such highly reputable company as Norton and Giamatti. The pacing is perfect. So many films, particularly in the age of the DVD when movies can be much longer, are bloated with many scenes that should have been edited out. Not this one.

The cinematography is quite interesting. It was a little annoying at first, but then I got it. A lot of the touches convey a sense of having been filmed long ago. The opening credits are jittery. The lighting is not uniform across the frame, leaving the edges and corners in shadow. Those shadows flicker as the background is brighter in some frames than others. All this is what we see in early film-making. Of course, this is in color rather than very high contrast black and white, but even the color has a sepia tint to it, which conveys a sense of age. It's no wonder the cinematography got an Oscar nomination.

There is one element of the film about which there appears to be a lot of confusion, and I don't know the right answer. I read several reviews of the film before writing this one, and several viewers were unimpressed with the film, primarily because of low quality CGI. The irony is that, from what I have read--and I don't claim that it's true--there was no CGI! One person writes

Finally, I understand how another letter writer may have thought the illusions were mere CGI. But no. As impossible as it may seem to believe (unless the filmmakers were flat-out lying when I saw this film at Sundance), there is not one scrap of CGI at play in the film's magic. The illusions are all authentic. No digital trickery. All performed by Norton. Which is amazing in and of itself. He apparently worked his butt off to learn them all and does a breathtaking job.

Kind of funny that someone does a real illusion, and people complain that it doesn't look real enough.