After The Prestige the SO and I were arguing for hours about the nature of sacrifice, revenge and identity (we get into similar arguments over John Varley stories) while fighting off intermittent shivers from some of the scenes in the movie.
After The Illusionist I couldn’t get past the overwhelming impression that Ed and Jessica were going to spend the rest of their lives bouncing quarters off each others asses.
I liked The Prestige a LOT more, although visually The Illusionist was stunning.
You just said exactly what bothered me about the Illusionist.
I have not seen the Illusionist. I didn’t like The Prestige in the end, because I disliked the characters. Both of them. Actually, for some reason, even though I think he is a good actor, I dislike Chritian Bale. I thought he was great in Batman, but still I don’t like him.
Really? The opening lines of his narration are “Actually, we know quite a bit about him,” then launches into a story that is clearly unreal (the old magician at the side of the road, which ends with the tree suddenly disappearing).
“Unreliable” may not be the correct word for his narration; “fable-like” (which I don’t think really is a word 
) may be closer.
Sorry to crop from an earlier post, but for some reason I posted a blank earlier. Here I think you may have missed the social sub-text of turn-of-the-century Vienna; there is clearly a point of view regreding the vanity and veniality of the aristocracy vs. the budding of democracy (not exactly an earth-shattering theme, but its there).
This is how I felt, as well. I likened it once to the modern music and non-period fashion details (lacy underwear, colored petticoats) of Moulin Rouge!. Some people were bothered by hearing L’il Kim in turn of the century France. I thought it was a brilliant way to get across the hyper excitement that the actual Moulin Rouge patrons would have felt. A honky-tonk rattling out the can-can to bored looking women in white skirts just wouldn’t be exciting to today’s audiences - the director’s intent was to make us feel what they felt, to reproduce the experience, not to make a naturalistic reproduction of it. Same here. While there were plenty of people doing convincing (for the day) ghost illusions with smoke and mirrors and a person standing under the stage, doing that exact illusion on film wouldn’t share with us as a modern audience how that FELT to the people of the day. “Cheating” with CGI and an impossible-back-then magic trick gave us the experience of being there, even if it wasn’t a naturalistic recreation.
This is off-topic, but could you expand on this a little? A major element of post-modernism, IMO, is to deconstruct archetypes and expose hidden narratives. “It’s magic” is no longer good enough to satisfy postmodern moviegoers; the magic has to be “explained” to a certain level (I’m not saying magic is no longer believable in film, but for it to be believable its properties must be well-defined and explained within the movie universe). Perhaps I’ve misunderstood…
Miller, you’re my new hero. I’ve spent a lot of breath arguing with a friend of mine who preferred Illusionist, and your posts are hitting the nail right on the head.
I absolutely loved Prestige, even though it required a suspension of disbelief so substantial that I almost didn’t succumb. And I surprised myself by falling in love with it, because reflexive cynicism is the one thing I always take with me into movies. 
But the tone of the movie, its lack of judgment on the characters’ flaws, was indeed a rare and welcome thing.
I do remember that scene, and if the movie had included more of that, I think your interpretation would likely carry through, but it’s an isolated moment at the very beginning of the story, and the film fails to re-enforce this theme at any later points in the story.
I think you’re better off with “unreliable.” The movie is, essentially, a police report, which should be as unfable-like a story as can be imagined.
No, I caught it, I was just unconvinced by it. It wasn’t properly welded to the story. It was more like a fig-leaf to excuse the protagonist’s actions. “Sure, he framed this guy for murder and drove him to suicide, but it’s okay, because… um… the guy wanted to be a dictator! Yeah, and German, too, so he’s sort of like Hitler, or something! It’s okay to frame Hitler for murder, right?” The story wasn’t about class strife, not in any meaningful way. Sure, Norton can’t marry Biel because he’s a commoner, and she’s a princess. But he can become world famous, fabulously wealthy, and move in the inner circles of Viennese politics. The movie presents the audience with no grosser class injustice than Norton not being allowed to bone the chick he wants to bone, and then tries to excuse his actions in that pursuit by cloaking it in a threadbare appeal to class struggle.
I think you’ve confused deconstructionism, which is a subset of post-modernism, with post-modernism as a whole. Certainly, magical realists are not bound by any particular requirement to explain the supernatural elements in their stories.
This is overly-simplistic. First off, there was the injustice of Biel’s character being used as a political pawn in Sewel’s planned coup. There was also the police state that had been set up under Sewel’s direction (Giamatti’s character was clearly disgusted with his role as Sewel’s pet, but felt he had no choice; why do you suppose that is if not for class dynamics?). Finally we have the general desperation of the Viennese lower-classes; why, for example, does the movie dwell on Eisenheims relationship with the street urchins, and the way the people of Vienna wanted to believe what they were seeing (why else would they gather outside the police station when he was arrested? Hell, his address from the balcony is a scene that has been repeated by any number of revolutionaries).
The film makes the specific point that Sewel could not be framed for murder in any meaningful way, technically because the supposed murder occurred on imperial grounds, but practically because no one in the aristocracy would take the matter seriously. The turning point is that Giammati sends a letter to the emperor detailing Sewel’s planned coup, not his crime of murder; this is what leads Sewel to kill himself. Eisenheim’s deception, then, was strictly for Giammati benefit, i.e. to get him to do something about the deplorable social conditions.
I still don’t understand this point, but I’m not sure its worth arguing over. Let me just say that in The Prestige, we’re given a lot of information about Tesla’s device (not merely the nuts-and-bolts, but also the motives and problems of the man who invented it, which surely underscores the device’s dramatic potential). In The Illusionist, we learn little to nothing about Eisenheim’s tricks except that they are illusions (i.e. not real magic). If The Prestige had, say, introduced the device as something found in a crazy scientist’s lab long after he’d died–that is with little or no exposition–it would not have worked inside the story structure (which I associate with Postmodernism). If, conversely, The Illusionist spent a lot of time explaining how the illusions worked–rather than reveling in their effect on the audience–this also would have been jarring in the fable-like context.
The problem here is that this all hinges on the treason plot Sewell has cooked up, which was not in the least convincing. As you note, Sewell is already untouchable due to the social structure of Vienna at the time. He’s also the next in line to succesion. There’s no reason for him to try to overthrow his father: it gains him nothing he would not come to possess in due time, it puts himself at unneccesary risk, and it could easily plunge his entire country into civil war, leaving them vulnerable to their predatory neighbors. It’s an idiotic plot, and it just screams, “Lazy screenwriter.” The entire subplot exists for one reason: to make Norton and Biel’s actions against him palatable to the audience.
Post-modernism is a very broad term. What you’re talking about (the explosion of archetypes etc.) is generally associated with one school of post-modernism: deconstructionism. Not all post-modernism is also deconstructionist, and there is nothing inherent in post-modernism that puts it at odds with a “fable-like” story. Indeed, there’s an entire genre of post-modernism that uses fairy tale elements in a modern context, without giving those elements a modern explanation: magical realism.
I’m not sure why your alternative explanation for the Tesla machine would not have worked in the context of The Prestige, except that we would have lost some of the exposition necessary to frame the existentialist argument at the heart of the movie, and been deprived of David Bowie’s freakin’ awesome entrance.
Post-modernism tends to be a catch-all term that encompasses too much to be truly meaningful and also varies from art to art.
However, a few good examples can be given.
One of the icons of modern architectural post-modernism is The Sony Building (formerly the A. T. & T. Building) by architects Philip Johnson & John Burgee.
Why? Because it was a response to the dictates of modernist architecture.
The modernists were themselves rebelling against the fussy detail of Victorian-era architecture. Like all good doctrinaire rebels they refused the obvious route of saying, do whatever you want, and indulged themselves with a plethora of rules that had to be followed to the letter or you were kicked out of the club. An absence of frivolous details was a prime rule, combined with blather about function being beauty and the like.
It turned out, to their total surprise, that people, the common, ordinary people they were purportedly designing for, loved detail. Loved fussy, frivolous, unnecessary detail. Whoda thunk?
So when Johnson & Burgee designed the AT&T building and added a frivolous, totally non-functional Chippendale-style, broken-front roof pediment, the architectural world went bananas. Everybody else said, meh, but it opened the doors so that architects could ignore function and add frivolity just for the fun of it.
Let’s try a different medium.
Superhero comics are totally modernist. You need a reason, however idiotic, for the superhero to come into being. You see this reflected in movies like The Matrix, whose world is run by human brains being used as computers. Idiotic beyond belief, but completely within the modernist world of function.
True postmodern science fiction films ignore this and just set up their worlds without regard to rules or reason. Think Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
So when you claim that “post-modern storytelling demands a certain level of rationalization for every event that occurs” you have it exactly backward. Post-modern storytelling doesn’t require any reasons. The story is all. The ending of The Illusionist is pure modernism. So is the ending of The Prestige, which is hardly surprising, since it is taken unchanged from a book by a noted science fiction writer, and science fiction is the primary literary expression of modernism in the sense of rules and reality. (The sense of modernism for radical experimentation like Eliot and Joyce is an example of how the meanings of these words are so skewed when applied to other arts.) Post-modernism takes the rules and jumbles or subverts or ignores them, just for the hell of it. This makes it totally incoherent as a movement, but we can identify examples when they are obvious.
I see what you mean now; “postmodern” was definitely the wrong term then. But even in the examples you cite, there is a rationale within the context of the film that imposes a meaning on the character’s actions. In Malchovich, although the origin of the door is never explained, it does have properties and rules that are clearly understood by the audience. Ditto the memory procedure used in Spotless Mind.
And–although this is only my opinion–each film seems to spend a lot of time exploring these properties; more perhaps than I’d expect in a typical screenplay. Perhaps this is merely a consequence of the bizzare story, but IMO similar storytelling gimmicks would have been handled more quickly/sketchily in older storytypes (some variant of “a wizard did it”, to borrow a line from The Simpsons).
I don’t know what to call it, but it seems to be a storytelling trend to add far more detail to a story setting than is really necessary to understand the plot. Perhaps our suspension-of-disbelief threshold has fallen to a threshold where “a wizard did it” is no longer adequate. Or maybe the advent of the Internet has simply multiplied the demand for topics we can discuss and argue about, like the dissection of movies about magicians :).
If I recall correctly, the few pictures we saw of Sewell’s father looked remarkably like Franz Joseph of Austria.
In real life, when his heir was assassinated, he (and his advisors) used the death of Franz Ferdinand as an excuse to declare war against Serbia.
Had Eisenheim left well enough alone and stopped thinking with his little head, he could’ve (unbeknownst to him, of course) prevented WW1 by allowing the coup to proceed. But he had to shoot his wad where it didn’t belong and 10+ million died as a result. 
This is a stretch and it illustrates exactly the problem with an exclusively rational/realist approach to criticism. The story is structured as a fairy tale; it is not designed as a clinical exercise in imperial politics. It is enough to know that Sewell is vain and rash–qualities he demonstrates repeatedly–to justify his ambition. These are not the qualities of a man who is willing to bide his time, much less care about whether or not his country is plunged into civil war. The details of the coup are immaterial.
If this were an historic treatment (Sewell’s character did not exist in the Austrian royal family, but anyway), I’d expect more of what you’re asking for. But the fact that it’s a disguised fable means it uses a fable’s shorthand, so Sewell is set up as the “scheming prince” early on.
It’s interesting to note that the frustrated prince saw thru all of Norton’s tricks, just as you’d expect of a schemer. He knew Eisenheim was fooling people, yet he could do nothing about it. For example, in the drawing room scene, as he tries to neutralize Eisenheim’s power over the audience by delaying the show to examine the picture, his approach backfires (Eisenheim deftly gives him the rope to hang himself by offering to turn up the lights).
Bowie’s turn as Tesla was a highlight for me; I didn’t realize it was him, and knew beforehand he was in it.
Let me elaborate on my point by way of example. Including detail about Tesla, his voluntary exile, and his losing relationship with Edison, I think, was a roundabout way of saying the machine is cursed. IMO given the way The Prestige was crafted, even though its about magic, you wouldn’t have been able to get away with simply having a curse on the device; a more grounded explanation is required to make the sense of impending doom plausible.
