Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #190 The Prestige (2006)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
When Bowie died a lot of stories came out about how particular and prickly he could be when it came to collaborations. Bowie being Bowie, everybody wanted to work with him. He was a God. He was a legend. He was a miracle. He was magic.
When the mere mortals in Coldplay asked him to do a song with them he turned them down, legendarily explaining, “‘It’s not a very good song, Is It?’
When it came to movies and music Bowie’s taste could be sublime, as when he produced early, seminal solo albums for Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, and it could be peculiar, like when he decided to hook up with Soupy Sales’ kids to form Tin Machine deep into his legendary career.
Having watched most of the movies Bowie graced with his regal presence for this column I still have no idea why he chose to waste his precious time with the sorry likes of B.U.S.T.E.D, Bandslam, August, Just a Gigolo and The Linguini Incident.
It’s much easier to see what attracted him to the role of Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s masterful 2006 melodrama of magic and soul-consuming obsession The Prestige.
Though he did not make anywhere near as many films as he could have, and should have, Bowie nevertheless got to work with a number of great directors and major filmmakers, including Nicolas Roeg, Tony Scott, Jim Henson, Martin Scorsese, John Landis, Luc Besson, Julien Temple, Ben Stiller, Nagisa Ōshima, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan.
Even more than his good friend and simpatico spirit Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan is truly a visionary filmmaker. With Nolan at least I can use the phrase “visionary” without it being coated in a thick layer of mocking irony, just as The Prestige is the rare film that can legitimately be deemed movie magic without jeering sarcasm.
In The Prestige that vision entails Batman and Wolverine squaring off against each other as rival magicians in 1890s London, with Alfred Pennyworth, the Goblin King with the enormous package and Black Widow caught up in their mind games and life and death competition.
“Larger than life” doesn’t begin to do justice to the outsized majesty of Bowie’s take on Tesla. Even before he’s introduced, Tesla has an incredible aura about him. The legendary inventor and scientist’s handiwork is everywhere in the form of wild jolts of electricity that seemingly belong to a science-fiction future rather than the past.
Bowie’s Tesla is a mad scientist in exile, an eccentric genius testing the limits of man’s knowledge in Colorado, of all places, where the Serbian-born icon sets up shop and the driven Robert "The Great Danton" Angier (Hugh Jackman) seeks him out as someone capable not just of incredible, mind-bending technology but something close to real magic.
There’s only one word for Bowie’s performance as Tesla: electrifying.
Bowie doesn’t have much in the way of screen time but he makes every second count. It’s stunt casting at its finest, one of our greatest rock stars playing a rock star of science who was seemingly on a different, higher evolutionary plane than the lesser souls around him.
Just a year after Batman Begins turned him into an international superstar Christian Bale reunited with writer-director Christopher Nolan to play Alfred "The Professor" Borden, a magician of humble origins who rises quickly through the ranks of London magicians by virtue of hard work, talent, a relentless obsession with getting to the top at all costs and a dark secret or two to assist him in the dark arts.
He’s a gritty, working class street magician, the kind who can dazzle you and the missus with sleight of hand but also beat you senseless in a dark alley if you encountered him on the wrong night.
Borden’s ferocious desire to be the best and single-handedly push the art and craft of magic forward single-handedly puts him on a collision course with Angier.
The flashy, sharp-dressed Angier turned his back on his prominent family for the sake of pursuing a vulgar profession as a master illusionist. The two rivals become enemies when Borden makes a mistake that costs the life of Angier’s wife Julia McCullough (Piper Perabo), an assistant for Milton the Magician (real life master magician turned character actor Ricky Jay, who needless to say, brings an automatic authenticity to the role and helped Bale and Jackman be more convincing as magicians).
When a trick goes awry, the beautiful assistant dies of a combination of drowning and Perabo, the actress playing her not being famous enough to be the female lead in a Christopher Nolan movie.
That distinction belongs instead to the considerably better known Scarlett Johansson, who plays Olivia Wenscombe, Angier’s assistant. The sex symbol’s ripe sexuality is the ultimate distraction and when Angier wants to learn the secret of his enemy’s most famous trick, a show-stopper called The Transformed Man where Borden appears to be teleporting between two onstage wardrobes, he sends her to his rival undercover in order to learn his trade secrets.
Like so many of Nolan’s films, The Prestige is an obsessive movie about obsession as well as a meta meditation on the nature of magic, illusion, storytelling and film. What are master filmmakers like Nolan if not cinematic magicians who use their craft to convince audience to believe in, and become deeply invested in things that never happened?
It does not seem coincidental that around the time the film takes place a French magician named George Melies was revolutionizing the brand spanking new medium of film using techniques borrowed from magic.
I suspect that seeing The Prestige would have inspired a combination of respect and envy from the long-dead French magician/director/innovator because Nolan has some nifty tricks up his sleeve that would have been unthinkable in Melies’ time.
There are so many twists and turns in The Prestige you’d think frightmaster M. Night Shyamalan had a hand in the screenplay but The Prestige distinguishes itself from Shyamalan’s oeuvre by not sucking.
I was weirdly reluctant to watch and write about The Prestige despite its stellar reputation because I vaguely remembered it being confusing and hard to follow. I’m pleased to report that was not a problem this time around, in no small part because I’d already seen it before, and knew the ending and also because I have access to the wonders of Wikipedia.
I haven’t seen a Christopher Nolan movie since Inception but re-watching The Prestige made me think I should get back into his films. Nolan may be dour and serious but he’s also a great filmmaker and storyteller and if The Prestige is not quite the masterpiece The Dark Knight or Inception is, it remains a terrific movie about magic, competition and obsession that’s even better when you know the big reveal if not quite as surprising.
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