"The Prestige"--Here Be Spoilers

The trailers looked excellent, and Mr. Sweetie is half in love with Scarlett Johansson, so last night we went to see the movie. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play rival magicians whose grudge escalates and threatens to overtake their lives.

Made by the Nolan brothers who also made Memento, this is a stylish movie. The look is rich and somehow gaslit looking, and the pacing is like that of a magic show, slightly ominous with the promise of an eerie surprise at the end.

Which The Prestige delivers. The end of the movie is set up very early, when Christian Bale's magician, Alfred Borden, is performing in a largely empty hall. He has made the bird in the cage disappear, and a young boy in the audience breaks into tears. When Borden pulls the bird out from behind his back, the boy will not be consoled. "But where is his brother?" Which is the secret to the trick, we soon see, as Borden empties the bloody body of the dead bird out of the collapsed cage, and says to the other one, "You were the lucky one tonight."

Hugh Jackman's magician, Robert Angier, lost his wife to a badly performed trick, and blames Borden for his loss. When he sees Borden with a wife and child, to all appearances happy, Angier is furious and mourns his own half-life. When he attempts to steal Borden's signature trick, he is forced to do it with a double, but insists there is more to the trick than that, so he sends his mistress to work for Borden and get the secret. She tells him Borden has a double, that she's seen the false beard and other items around, but Angier won't believe her.

Of course, it is a movie all about doubling, and as a consequence, of halving as well. Borden does have a double, a twin, and they take turns being Borden or Borden's assistant. They are so dedicated to their magic that they take turns living Borden's entire life: between the two of them they only have a single life. One of them is in love with Borden's wife Sarah, the other is in love with Scarlett Johansson, the mistress. When the trap closes, and Borden is hanged for murder, it's irrelevant which one it is--like the bird in the first trick, it's whichever one was unlucky that time.

Angier finds another way to complete the trick: he gets Nicholas Tesla to build a machine which actually duplicates him, so at the end of each night's show, the duplicate disappears through a trapdoor and falls into a watertank where he is drowned. The tank is removed each night, under wraps, and at the end of the movie we see the degree to which Angier has sold his soul to be a magician: there is an entire warehouse of "the Prestige items;" the tanks with their corpses floating within.

Nice literary touch: After Tesla has built the machine that creates clones, "Edison's men" arrive in town and torch the place, evoking the image of torch wielding villagers from Frankenstein.

Favorite (inadvertent?) humorous moment: Angier speaking on stage to the audience at his magic show (paraphrased): "You may be amazed at what you see, and I assure you it is quite real" as the camera centers the shot on Scarlett Johansson's bosom, balanced precariously on a push-up corset. Issac Mizrahi surely agrees.