Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet

A week into my latest California trip, and there have been none of the anticipated Curb Your Enthusiasm high-jinks I mentioned a few weeks ago. So instead, I’m going to talk about books and (stage) magic, and hope that maybe I'll get into a bizarre confrontation in the next eight days or so.

I was pleased to see that The Prestige was one of the film choices offered on the plane. Somehow I didn’t find the time to see this at the cinema, which can only mean that I’ll never find the time to visit the cinema again, since if any film was meant to appeal to me it was surely this one, with its inspired blend of the late Victorians, stage magic, and David Bowie. It perhaps didn’t help that I’d been put off by lukewarm reviews from friends, or maybe I was afraid that something combined of so many delicious ingredients could all too easily turn out to be a horrible mess, like finding a fillet steak stuffed in the middle of a chocolate fudge gateaux. Finding this film on the plane was also something of a pleasant coincidence, since on my last US tour (literally a tour this time, taking in the airports of Washington Dulles, Philadelphia, Chicago O’Hare, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles LAX, San Francisco, and Sacramento (where I learnt that customer service at NorthWest Airlines follows a formal structure of a) theft, b) hiding, c) lying, d) suggesting that I am lying, and e) indifference)) in December, I had been reading Christopher Priest’s novel upon which the film is based. I had started reading it in Heathrow Terminal 3 (the site of last weeks’ entry, doughnut fans), and got about a hundred pages into it before boarding. Incidentally, when boarding the plane, I decided I’d had enough of historical conjuring for the moment and stopped reading, in order to watch The Illusionist instead, a film with similar conjuring themes but which deserves some sort of award for the most frenetic final two minutes of narrative (a bit like the end of The Usual Suspects but instead of just being able to walk normally after all, Kevin Spacey also gets out a sack containing the heads of every character to have appeared in the film, including that of the detective who’s just been interviewing him). The Illusionist is a good film, but an oddly muted one since nothing about it seems particularly original, from its plot twists to casting Rufus Sewell as the bad guy. Once I’d watched it, I wanted to get back to Priest’s novel, which seemed to be developing into something quite different. Unfortunately, an annoying thing like the MLA convention got in the way of finishing it as quickly as I would have liked, and there are probably more atmospheric places to read the final pages than the foyer at the Philadelphia Sheraton. Nonetheless, it is a superb piece of storytelling which I recommend to anybody who’s bothered to read this far.

Achtung! Spoilers ahead!

(Well, maybe not really, but I once knew somebody who, while watching films he already knew the end of, would make various comments throughout which while seeming to him cryptic and veiled hints, were to the rest of us glaring premonitions of what was to come. So during Planet of the Apes we would get “Oh yes, they’re so very far away from Earth,” or perhaps “It’s hardly as if they’ve got the Statue of Liberty around the corner.” It was the social equivalent of the bit in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo where a few pages have a hole cut through them so you can see what’s going to happen before you actually get there (Albert Angelo is another highly recommended novel, and easily found in your local Waterstone’s as the first part of Johnson’s Omnibus). So, if you don’t even want to receive obvious hints or perhaps semi-spoilers, I should go somewhere else for now.)

To what may prove the dismay of some of my friends, I also liked the film a lot, and I think this divergence of opinion has something to do with narrative expectation. I suspect The Prestige will become known as a ‘twist’ film, the kind of movie judged solely against its ability to conceal the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow’s head was really a ghost, or something similar. Having already read the novel, however, the film would have to be something more than already knowing all the secrets. And, you know, I think that it was. My friends complained that the film’s twist was too obvious, that there were far too many clues. Admittedly, there are parts which are handled clumsily; Christopher Nolan should surely have known better than to have heavily made up and virtually mute characters appear momentarily on screen, but otherwise get mentioned a lot. But that doesn't seem to matter somehow, because the film's main twist is in many ways so obvious that it almost doesn't qualify as a surprise - and yet, when it comes, it still has a surprising quality. It also helps that the story is sufficiently strong that, given sufficient production values and quality of acting (which are both evident here), it can withstand most of the more common indignities of adaptation. There are changes both significant and subtle here; the modern day strand of the novel has been dropped to good effect, while a slightly more low key alteration in the plot (regarding the effects of Tesla's invention) makes the whole thing even more sinister than Priest's already satisfyingly macabre original. The attempt to delve into the history of magic is laudable - the inclusion of Chung Ling Soo is a nice touch and for those us familiar with the field, a nice foregrounding of later events - although it does trip the film up at times (one character mentions the 'sawing a lady in half' trick about twenty years before it first appeared). If there is a failing, and one which I think may account for some of the more lukewarm reviews (rather than the 'twist' or otherwise which most people seem to have focused on), it's that the film is not quite so good as the original novel in sliding from one genre to another, when the sleights of hand turn into science fiction. There is time and scope in the novel to make the change gradual and persuasive; the film also does it well, but I suspect many may be unconvinced by the switch.

So, The Prestige (in either format) is highly recommended. And certainly more so than Deja Vu, one of the other film choices. This is one of those conceptual thrillers Hollywood is so fond of nowadays, but unfortunately let down by the fact that its concept is a crock. An absolute crock.