Magic At The Movies
Sunday Morning film critic David Edelstein says that magic is taking center stage at the movies this season.
You've heard the expression "the magic of movies," but what have rarely been magical are movies about magicians. I'm not talking about Harry Potter and his ilk; I mean stage magicians, showmen, rabbit-out-of-hat guys. It's easy to understand why filmmakers ignore them. The magician relies on sleight of hand and misdirection, and on screen you can just stop the camera and turn even a klutz like me into a wizard.
It has been half a century since the generally OK biopic of America's most legendary magician, Harry Houdini. Tony Curtis played him, and there's a great scene where he gets back at some hecklers throwing fruit. It's too bad the movie perpetuated the myth that Houdini died because he couldn't escape from a water tank — try appendicitis.
It's also too bad that Hollywood has ignored Houdini's most compelling disciples, the card-carrying skeptics like James "The Amazing" Randi and Penn & Teller, who revere Houdini because he used his knowledge of magic to expose fake spiritualists: He knew how easy it was to manipulate our senses.
Alas, Penn & Teller's genius for announcing how they're going to mislead you and then doing it didn't translate to their tedious feature, "Penn & Teller Get Killed."
Suddenly, there are two hit movies about magicians, and I don't think it's a coincidence that both are period pieces, set in that marvelous turn-of-the-nineteenth-century era when electricity was newly harnessed and stage machinery had a whiff of the paranormal.
In "The Illusionist," Edward Norton has the perfect smirky elegance to play a magician who might or might not be able to harness supernatural forces. That's how the movie teases us: Is he a trickster or can he commune with dead people — among them Jessica Biehl, who seems to have been murdered by a nasty crown prince? The film has a wondrous silent-movie palette, and as Vienna's chief inspector, the marvelous Paul Giamatti speaks in plummy tones that conjure up one noble spirit — James Mason.
"The Prestige" sounded like a treat — a trick and a treat. It's about rival magicians played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, and when Jackman's lover dies in, yes, a water tank, the two start sabotaging each other's acts and even mutilating each another. Some critics really love this thing, but it's a movie for very literal-minded people who don't know the difference between magic and flim-flam.
