The Prestige (2006) Christopher Nolan
12A
Running Time: 2h 10m
Starring:
Christian Bale – Hugh Jackman – Piper Perabo – Rebecca Hall – Scarlett Johansson – Michael Caine – David Bowie
SPOILERS WARNING!!!! If you haven’t yet seen this and don’t want to spoil your virgin eyes, then leave this article right now and go watch it! Otherwise …
A tale of two stage magicians that became rivals. I think about this film a lot because I love the way that Christopher Nolan manages to perform a magic trick on the audience, even though the premise of the film is told to us from the outset.
The film is in three acts, the same way that a magic trick is in three parts: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
The pledge, which sets up the trick and in the film sets up what is to be expected. In fact it is the opening scene that shows many top hats in the middle of a forest. It gives the audience something to think about even before the film has started. Why are there so many hats? Why are the hats seemingly abandoned in a forest? So many questions!
In Victorian London, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angiers (Hugh Jackman) are shills for a magic act, with Cutter (Michael Caine) as their mentor. The magician’s assistant, Julia (Piper Perabo) also happens to be Angiers’ wife. She unfortunately drowns as her hands are bound with a difficult knot (tied by Borden) and the two men subsequently become enemies.
Borden meets a young lady named Sarah (Rebecca Hall), they fall in love and get married. He also starts performing his own tricks, namely the bullet catch trick, while Angier stays with Cutter. When Angier discovers that Borden has carried on with his life, while he is a broken man, causes him to get angry, finds Borden performing his trick (he is wearing a disguise so that Borden won’t recognise him), and subsequently shoots two of his fingers off. Painful!
Borden, who seems filled with resilience, has devised a new trick, ‘The Transported Man’. This further enrages Angier as he can’t figure it out, while Cutter is insisting that Borden is using a double. Angier, whose jealousy is evident, wants to perform the trick himself, and hires a double, named Gerald Root (also Hugh Jackman!). The problem that Angier now has is that Root is the one being applauded at the end of the trick as he is the one onstage, leaving Angier a little bit perplexed.
Angier has acquired a female assistant named Olivia (Scarlett Johansson). They seem quite close, but Angier has tasked her to keep an eye on Borden. She does as she is asked, and becomes Borden’s assistant, however she falls in love with him and feels guilty for spying on him. Borden, now ready to retaliate after his accident, sabotages Angiers act, which leaves Angier to rely on using a walking stick. Olivia gives Angier Borden’s journal and leaves him as his obsession is boiling over to the point that he is no longer thinking of his dead wife as the source of his revenge. Angier can’t figure it out because Borden has written it in code, he needs a cipher to decode it. Angier decides that he will kidnap Bernard Fallon (Borden’s engineer), and bury him alive in order to get the cipher from Borden, who is willing to give it up for the safe return of Fallon.
The keyword is Tesla …
Angier sets off to America to find Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), he also discovers that the journal is a fake, designed to distract him (which it obviously does). After some serious discussion (about obsession), Tesla creates a machine for Angier, and it becomes evident that the machine is not transporting anything, rather it is duplicating whatever goes into the machine.
Tesla is having problems of his own, he is being driven away by Thomas Edison (his rival), who uses a shill to refute Tesla’s work. Before he leaves, he sends the machine to Angier with a note, a warning to destroy it as it will bring him nothing but misery.
In the meantime, Sarah is convinced that there is something very wrong with her husband, and in her despair, kills herself. Olivia is confused and later disgusted with Borden’s attitude towards Sarah’s death and leaves him.
Angier returns to England with his machine, and enlists Cutter’s help to get a theatre, he is also adamant that Cutter does not go backstage throughout the perfomance. His show is for a limited time only, creating much suspense. Borden, naturally, is curious, and goes to investigate ‘The New Transported Man’ trick. He sneaks backstage to snoop, and while there Angier has performed his trick, and Borden then witnesses Angier fall through the trap door and drown in a water tank beneath the stage, causing him to shout for help. Cutter finds Borden near the corpse, and immediately calls for the police, and Borden is arrested for Angier’s murder. After testimony from an unknowing Cutter, Borden is found guilty, and is sentenced to be hanged.
While awaiting his fate, Borden is visited by a representative of Lord Caldlow, a high society man with an avid interest in magic, who is offering to adopt his soon to be orphaned daughter, Jess, as a trade for all of his tricks in full. When Borden does agree and meets with Caldlow, he realises quickly that it is really Angier, seemingly in disguise. The truth is that Angier was the disguise, as Caldlow didn’t want to smudge his family name by practising a ‘low’ art like magic. Caldlow gloats that he finally has revenge for Julia’s death, and leaves Borden a broken man.
When Cutter realises the truth about Angier/Caldlow, he is upset and cuts him off, but not before helping him to be rid of the machine that seemingly has fulfilled its purpose.
Borden is hanged for his ‘non’ crime, while Angier is preparing to put the machine away. While there, he is approached by a stranger and subsequently shot. The stranger is Alfred Borden. Alfred Borden? We just saw him being hanged!
The reveal is that Alfred Borden is actually an identity shared by twins, Albert and Frederick = Alfred! One would be Borden and the other, Fallon (the engineer), and they would change their roles regularly. When Borden’s fingers were shot off by Angier, his twin amputated the same fingers so that they could maintain their disguise. The surviving twin is Albert, and he was the one that was married to Sarah, while Frederick was in love with Olivia.
When Angier first used Tesla’s machine, it is here that we discover that the machine does not transport, but duplicates. A bewildered Angier looks at his doppelganger (who is the original Angier) and in a panic, shoots and kills him. It becomes evident that later, during the performances, it happens every time, making Angier a carbon copy of himself. That is the answer to the original question at the very beginning, why so many hats? Because the hats were the original experiment material before Angier comes along.
As Angier is dying from the gunshot, he drops the lantern that he is holding, and sets the theatre alight. Borden leaves to collect his daughter, whom Cutter has been looking after.
Back at the burning theatre, the illumination of the fire reveals rows of tanks that hold the dead copies of Angier.
Now that the synopsis is out of the way, here are a few themes that I found to be interesting …
Doubles
The first noticeable thing about doubles in this film is the scene where Sarah’s nephew gets upset after the trick of the disappearing bird in the cage. He cries “Where’s his brother?” At first this seems to be irrelevant, however, upon the second viewing (or third, or fourth!) that we realise it is Nolan’s allusion to Alfred being a twin. Alfred is working at the theatre where this happens, in fact, this is how he meets Sarah, who later becomes his wife. It is also the set up with Cutter narrating the process of a magic trick to seemingly the audience, until it is revealed that he is talking to a little girl, Borden’s little girl.
The Ship of Theseus
The ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that questions whether an object which has had all of its components changed remains the same object. So this about Angier. After his first test run on Tesla’s machine, the viewer sees that the original Angier has returned to the house from wherever he was transported to, and his doppelganger in complete surprise, believing that he is the original, picks up a gun and shoots him. So in theory, is Angier the same man after all of his performances? How has he retained his memory despite the fact that he is effectively a clone?
Obsession
Both men are obsessed with magic! Angier left behind his aristocratic roots in order to pursue his love of magic. Borden is obsessed with maintaining the secret of his twin, as well as the perfect trick that no one else can fathom, while Angier is obsessed with Borden, in order to exact revenge for the manslaughter of his wife, and just how does he do that trick, the transported man? It is Angiers obsession that proves to be deadly for everyone involved.
Secrecy
Secrets are the nature of the game of magic, this is because no self-respecting magician would ever divulge their tricks (look at the character of Chung Ling Soo, who was so fully committed to his art, that he was never seen out of character). As I previously mentioned, Borden goes a long way to maintain the secret of having a twin, and sharing a ‘half-life’ with him, despite the fact that they are both romantically linked to different women. Angiers keeps his secret that he is in fact Lord Caldlow, and downplays his privilege to everyone. It is a bit of a reach, but Cutter keeps a secret when he tells Angiers about a drowning person feeling blissful as they are about to die in order to placate him as he grieves over his wife’s death.
Sacrifice
Borden sacrifices his life for a half-life with his twin, his twin sacrifices his healthy fingers, so that they can maintain the illusion of being one man.
Angiers has sacrificed his privileged life (or did he?) for the sake of his art, to go on to sacrificing his body as he clones himself each night of the performance.
Cutter sacrificed his dignity by working with Angiers again, after so many dastardly incidents that should have made him stay well away. Another person that sacrificed their dignity was Olivia Wenscombe, who became an assistant to both men and even performed as a double agent for a short time.
This film does not end well for most. With both Angiers and Borden dead, the rivalry is over. The surviving twin, Albert, however, is able to take his daughter from Cutter’s care and live a normal and happy life.
So there you have it, the reasons why I can’t stop thinking about The Prestige. What did you think about it? How many views did you need to get your head around it? This enquiring mind needs to know!
Ronin Cinema 