Perhaps the only Nolan film where his talent for engineering inhuman characters is exactly what the film needs.
By the film’s end, you’re not supposed to like anybody – which is common, if perhaps not always intended, in a Christopher Nolan film. Along the way, you’re supposed to be suspicious of everyone in the film – or at least, guessing at their motives and distrusting of their morality. I mean, it takes a particular… talent (?) to make Hugh Jackman not-likeable – his character, Robert Angier, is quickly established as a widower, and you still don’t feel particularly bad for him, so it’s fortunate that the story soon after gives you reasons to mistrust, and ultimately dislike, his character as much as everyone else’s, including most of all his partner-turned-rival fellow magician, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Except Andy Serkis and David Bowie‘s Tesla: the scenes with them are quite, well, magical.
The Prestige looks beautiful, of course, because Nolan and his heads of department don’t mess around, and the high-wire balancing act between convoluted pretension and popcorn spectacle in a magic trick is the story both within the film and of the film-making. Ultimately, The Prestige is a pit-of-the-stomach-cold-inducing film whose jigsaw puzzle deployment of information represents a perfect meeting of story and storyteller. It’s not that Nolan understood this assignment – it’s that he was made for it.
Further Viewing
Nolan’s piecemeal film-making style can be traced back to his feature debut, Following (1998), filmed on weekends and on the cheap: