Overdue #12 The Prestige (2006)

Christopher Nolan, currently directing the leaky ship that is The Dark Knight Rises, has gone through something of a reputation change over the past few years. Formerly recognised as the dark visionary responsible for the uncompromising Memento and the Ridley Scott-inflected Batman Begins. However ever since The Dark Knight sidelined Gotham’s gothic trappings for a sterile metropolitan ‘crime saga’. However, the film that cemented Nolan’s shift toward so called ‘intellectual’ fare butted its head violently against the glass ceiling was none other, than Inception. Elevated by sheer hyperbole (the film rocketed to imdb’s top 5 within a day of its release) which then foisted upon critical opinion the notion that Nolan was the natural successor to Stanley Kubrick. To a great degree, critical acclaim is one of the best and worst things to happen to an ‘auteur’, as the previous work’s that identified him or her in the past are sidelined in favour of their new ilk.

In this respect, Nolan’s last film before this shift was 06’s The Prestige. Arguably one of his best films alongside Memento, and better indeed than Inception. But it’s crucial to understand why.
Nolan may have always been a literary filmmaker, but he’s only been a humanistic one on rare occasion. Prestige is of course one of his more human tales, a story of betrayal, vanity and revenge: all the things Inception lacks and desperately needs. Furthermore, it’s movie that proves that Nolan is more than a thematic pragmatist, in other words, he understands character dilemmas. More importantly, the choices characters make have consequences that affect other characters. Mistakes are made that spoil friendships, leading to a tit-for-tat cycle that is as volatile as it is unpredictable. Inception shot itself in the foot with its linearity, for an inverted heist movie it is remarkable that at no point do we have a single double-crosser in the extraction gang. Worse still, Nolan’s realisation of this is demonstrated in his ham-fisted attempt at character depth in the relationship between Cobb and Mal. An out of place sub-plot betraying Nolan’s paternal paranoia (himself a father of two), made worse by the total lack of compelling character conflict elsewhere. Imprinting itself in our sub consciousness as a diagram of human flaw, as opposed to a beating heart.

Guillermo del Toro recited an anecdote about screenwriting during his audio commentary for The Devil’s Backbone, the conclusion of his point was ‘don’t tell me, show me’. He was referring to the power of visuals verses the written word, in many respects this leads us to The Prestige’s most compelling elements. For once, Nolan managed to tell a story with images, the exposition is informative, compelling but never excessive. Inception however is a screenplay that is so dense in its explanations, that characters are not only under-developed but the images end up being faint visual shadows of the written word. The film cannot speak for itself. The Prestige however, while reliant on exposition via voiceover or otherwise, feels much more in tune with its visual cues. There is a symbiosis between Wally Pfister’s cinematography, editing, sound and screenplay not evident in Inception. All of this once again is in service to the fact that, The Prestige is a film that delivers emotional and moral impact. This is a Nolan who understood the power to scare and disturb, whether it be in the images of wordless suicide or the eerie truth behind The Transported Man. Nolan now seems too concerned with what his film means, as a result his previous two pictures are overlong (running an average of two and half hours), ideologically dense and sporadically human. Its humanity that counts, and what The Prestige delivers in spades, warts and all.