Too clever by half

Imagine a necklace, its wooden locket small, flat, lozenge-shaped. It has a seam along its long diagonal, and it is hinged at the center. Twist it, and it changes from lozenge to heart, and what’s more, a new seam appears. Now the wearer may open the heart, revealing a tiny photo of the face of her beloved.

But the locket is a fiction, a special effect, and the metaphorical strings and wires are in plain sight. Seams visible one shot vanish in the next. Someone has done some sleight of hand, and it wasn’t the young girl’s lover, the budding Illusionist. The locket isn’t a magician’s trick; it’s merely the prop of a dishonest filmmaker.

This is one of the film’s earliest images, and also one of its most emblematic. The filmmaker (director and screenwriter Neil Burger) isn’t content to leave visual deceit to his protagonist, commoner-cum-performer Eisenheim (Edward Norton). He’s willing to fool his audience, too, with misleading reaction shots and uproariously illogical character motivations, whatever is necessary to lead his viewers by their noses to his oh-so-predictable surprise ending.

Spoilers.

Here’s the setup: a peasant boy captures the attention of a daughter of royalty by virtue of his prodigious skills as a magician. To be specific, she sees him balancing an egg on a stick and thinks, Damn. If he can do THAT to a chicken egg, just think what he could do to one of MY eggs. Love is inevitable. They are discovered by the girl’s keepers, who merely threaten the boy. Flash forward. The boy is now master illusionist Eisenheim, darling of the Vienna off-Broadway scene, and the girl is the betrothed of the Crown Prince Leopold.

We are told Leo (Rufus Sewell, whom Karen and I remembered from Dark City) is a cad who beats his women and is rumored to have killed his last squeeze. Be that as it may, he’s enough of a creep to volunteer his fiance, Sophie (Jessica Biel), for one of Eisenheim’s seemingly deadly illusions. Sophie and Eisenheim’s eyes meet, they recognize one another instantly, and soon they’re boffing like horny ferrets in a flurry of naked arms, knees, and elbows. Hey, it’s PG-13. You do get to see one nipple, but it belongs to Norton.

It’s such a pretty movie. It looks good. You find yourself wanting this movie to succeed; and yet, time and again, the screenplay disappoints. As with any random James Bond movie, you’ll yell at the screen, “Wait! Why don’t you just KILL him and be done with it?” Because, really, why wouldn’t the Crown Prince knock off this rival for his fiance’s affection? But, no. Perhaps you can attribute this reservation to the scruples of Leo’s security man, Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), but the Crown Prince has no such scruples. When at last he tells Uhl, “I’ll have to do it myself,” I thought, At last. He’s going to kill Eisenheim, or at least beat the crap out of him. But the guy who took such a beating in Fight Club suffers nary a scratch.

Much of the movie concerns Sophie’s death, apparently at the hands of Leopold. Was anyone fooled by this? Not Inspector Uhl, who only figures things out in the movie’s last scene. He even had the opportunity to examine Sophie’s “corpse,” which had been floating in cold water for umpteen hours. Does he smell a fake? No. But then, we’re asked to accept that age-old contrivance, the Drug That Makes You Feign Death (No Pulse, No Respirations, No Body Warmth) Yet Does Not Kill You.

The real pisser is Neil Burger’s assumption of single-digit IQs on the part of his viewers. As most of you know, the goal of any mystery is to sustain the unknown until such time as the detective unravels everything. Ideally, the reader/viewer and the detective figure it out simultaneously, or else the reader/viewer retrospectively realizes he could have figured it out, if he’d been a little fleeter of mind. How do mysteries fail? On the one hand, by concealment of necessary information; on the other, by making the solution obvious far in advance of the revelation.

The Illusionist falls down on the latter. But even that would have been forgivable, had it not been for the main characters’ baffling actions near the end. We’re asked to believe that everyone around Leopold knows of his plan to topple his father, yet his father hasn’t caught wind of it. We’re asked to believe that his father would deny his son the Empire merely for the death of one girl. (Has Burger been asleep these last six years? Doesn’t he know the capacity of Power to lie and cheat its way beyond the death even of thousands?) We’re asked to believe that the Leopold would sooner off himself than bluster his way through this latest wrinkle to his plans.

Movies achieve epic standards of crappiness only when they shoot for epic greatness and fail. As I mentioned the other day, Crank was a stupid movie, but it wasn’t trying to be anything other than a mindless romp. Success! The Illusionist aims for Best Picture status and falls far short of the mark.

I give it four out of four stars. Why? Because Jessica Biel looks soooo good in a dress in the movie’s last shot. (There! I shouted at my family. Look! That redeems the whole mess.) Some things are important.

D.

Walnut, January 26, 2007. Category: Reviews, Stardust.

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