The Illusionist
Movie Review
The Illusionist
by Eric D. Snider
Grade: C+
Released: August 18, 2006
Directed by:
Cast:
Calling "The Illusionist" a romantic thriller is like calling a chihuahua a guard dog. It might technically be true, but you shouldn't expect much from it.
It has the trappings of romance, sure enough -- a turn-of-the-last-century Viennese setting, gorgeous period costumes, a lush Philip Glass musical score, and a plot involving star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the tracks.
Eisenheim (Edward Norton), the son of a cabinetmaker, is now a popular stage magician, a purveyor of tricks so clever they border on the supernatural. (Indeed, like most films about magicians, this one has him doing things that no real-life magician would be able to duplicate.) Night after night his theater fills with people from all over Vienna, including a police inspector named Uhl (Paul Giamatti) who fancies himself an amateur illusionist and is keen to learn the secrets.
One night Eisenheim calls for a volunteer from the audience and realizes the woman who has responded is Sophie (Jessica Biel), the duchess he shared a brief, forbidden love affair with when they were teenagers. She is now engaged to marry Leopold (Rufus Sewell), the crown prince and a truly humorless man. She doesn't love him, though, and she and Eisenheim rekindle their old feelings.
Now, if being in love with a duchess who's engaged to a prince sounds like a bad idea, factor in the prince's famously sour disposition and see what you come up with. Inspector Uhl discovers the affair, reports to Leopold, and soon enough there is a murder. It befalls the living to vindicate the dead and uncover the villain, and that's where the "thriller" part of the film's description comes into play.
Written and directed by Neil Burger from a short story by Steven Millhauser, "The Illusionist" can boast Giamatti's performance as the garrulous, obsessive inspector as its strongest asset -- and Edward Norton's performance, sadly, as its weakest. Norton's accent is dubious, an evanescent combination of British and Austrian (Braustrian, I like to call it), and it masks a problem I've never seen Norton have before: He seems to have no idea who he's playing. There is no sense of weight or depth in Eisenheim, even when he's allegedly expressing emotion over his perilous situation with Sophie.
Of Jessica Biel, as usual, the less said the better. Ditto Rufus Sewell's scenery-chewing as Leopold.
It's a marginal story, and passionless in the way it's been antiseptically brought to the screen, but it's not unenjoyable. Lackluster performances aside, the film evokes its time and place exceptionally well. This may be enough to transport viewers to 1900 Vienna and give them some satisfaction, though they might be disappointed to discover the film has nothing up its sleeve after all.
Grade: C+
Rated PG-13, a bit of sexuality, one F-word
1 hr., 50 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 7 comments
June 2, 2007 at 2:27 pm
What annoyed me was the fact that they guy does the impossible. The magic distracted more than impressed because nothing he does is remotely possible. It'd be one thing if they hinted that he had real magic, but the end seems to show that he's just a super-genius mechanic or something. That annoyed me.
June 2, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I agree with you, John Doe. The film was somewhat more interesting when his magic was supposedly the real thing. Whatever interest I had in the story burst when he revealed they were mere (impossible) tricks after all.
June 2, 2007 at 6:58 pm
That's one of the reasons I liked "The Prestige." The magic in that movie was either realistic or at least remotely believable.
June 9, 2007 at 10:55 am
The "magic" in "The Prestige" involved an electromagnetic machine that created clones. I don't think that counts as "either realistic or at least remotely believable." I liked "The Illusionist" better--I prefer mere tricks to magic.
October 24, 2007 at 1:05 am
I'm afraid you missed the gist with this film. It's called the Illusionist and if you pay close attention to the lightning denoument you realise it was nothing more than that. In fact the film itself performs it's "magic" so well that you believe initially that he has sold his soul to the other side, but in truth, as he clearly states, it is merely an illusion (and I wouldn't rate these tricks any higher on the impossibility scale than Penn and Teller). I agree with you on the performances (although Giamatti's intriguing character and steller performance I think go quite a long way to make up for other's), and the supposed do-anything-for-you romance isn't really seen, but I would bump it up to a B+.
March 8, 2008 at 7:06 pm
***spoiler***
So can anyone explain the one trick that he does explain/write instructions for? He has a plotted plant, which then sprouts. Just a sprout mind you, not a branch. This sprout turns into a bush/tree. The tree, which had nothing, then sprouts fruit. The fruit is edible.
So...I'm lost. I'm no physicist, but even the best machanic can't hide a 3 inch orange into a 1 inch branch. Let alone a sprout turning into a tree, not a tree rising up out of the dirt in the pot. That's the problem with the movie. The trick is impossible, so it's easy to believe he has real magic. But then its just like "it's just a trick, nothing to see here." It annoyed me it was such a cop-out.
February 17, 2011 at 7:50 pm
@John Doe:
The only way I can think of it being possible is if the 3 inch oranges that come out of the 1 inch branch are in fact fakes that somehow balloon out once they've extruded through the tree. From the audience they would look real. It would be simple for the magician to pick one, palm it, and then toss out a real orange.
I agree with EiksusM. I think the reason why The Prestige is more satisfying is because they explained how the cloning was done. In The Illusionist we were left with no idea how he was able to create perfect holograms.