Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie
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Alley (Andy Serkis), Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), and Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Tesla’s Colorado laboratory in The Prestige (2006)
A few days ago I started rereading The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, a World Fantasy Award winner about Victorian magicians locked in a mutually destructive rivalry. I last read it as a senior in college almost twenty years ago. It’s very good—much richer and more absorbing than I remembered—and rereading the book has also got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation.
The book and the film are quite different (Priest was, it’s worth noting, in awe of the movie) but I don’t intend to examine those differences here. The movie has been one of my favorites since it came out and has rewarded years of viewing. But what I’ve realized now, to my surprise, is that after almost two decades and seven more films, The Prestige remains Nolan’s best movie.
I write this as a fan of Nolan—not a fanboy, but a fan, someone who likes and appreciates what he does and looks forward to each new Nolan project. I don’t intend to disparage his more recent movies, most of which I’ve liked. I just think that, with hindsight, The Prestige stands out as a work produced 1) at the height of Nolan’s powers and 2) before he became distracted by some of the qualities that have defined—and occasionally weakened—his subsequent movies.
Some notes toward refining my argument:
Technically The Prestige is pretty much perfect. Wally Pfister’s anamorphic cinematography is beautiful and atmospheric and incorporates handheld work for a subtle contemporary feel without succumbing to the Bourne-style chaos of the mid-2000s. It also, like Barry Lyndon and Amadeus, allowed for shooting by candlelight. (Read American Cinematographer’s article on The Prestige; I ate this up when the movie came out.) The film feels real and authentic, a mood enhanced by the costume and set design, which establish the easily-caricatured Victorian London as a real place.
Also on the technical side: the editing (by Lee Smith, who has cut several other Nolan movies) is excellent, probably the best of Nolan’s career. It’s really the editing that makes this movie. Though The Prestige tells its story along multiple chronological timelines, jumping forward and backward in time with occasional flashes forward or backward as characters remember or reflect, it does so effortlessly. Despite its complexity it is easy to follow and requires almost no internal explanation.
The music by David Julyan is, as so often with Nolan’s films, there to enhance atmosphere and mood rather than to soar on memorable leitmotifs. It does its job perfectly, without distraction or—as in the last few Nolan films—drowning out dialogue.
The performances are also excellent, the standouts being Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, both of whom play two roles. This is where rewatching The Prestige most pays off—once you know what’s going on with Alfred Borden it’s easy to see, through Bale’s performance, that he’s two people with distinct, conflicting personalities: one cautious and softspoken, one aggressive and brash. This has the unique effect of making the ending more powerful after the twist has been revealed.
Of course, all of this technical and artistic craft is in the service of a good story, which is the best reason to watch any movie. There are plenty of technically admirable movies that are not interesting, entertaining, or meaningful. The Prestige is all of these.
Why The Prestige stands out so much in retrospect: it has, on paper, a lot of Nolan’s tics and preoccupations—multiple identities, family tragedy, crime, deception, the nature of reality, and memory—but allows them to arise naturally from the story. By contrast:
Music: I enjoy some Nolan movie soundtracks (Interstellar is perhaps the last great one), but since Inception they have gotten more bombastic and intrusive. This is, perhaps, emblematic of the rest of my complaints below.
The Prestige was the last of Nolan’s movies to be shot before he began his ongoing experiment with large-format filmmaking, especially IMAX. He has used this as more than a gimmick—like 3D, which he rightly avoided—but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the form has started to overwhelm the story. The frequent switching between formats and aspect rations in his more recent movies is also just distracting. I find myself wishing more and more for a film with a single consistent visual technique, especially one as wonderful as what Nolan and Pfister created in The Prestige.
More seriously, even if we disregard form or technique, the structure of Nolan’s movies since has become a more and more overt, obvious part of the story. Where The Prestige smoothly moves the audience back and forth through several different timelines, both trusting the audience enough to understand and expertly editing the film to make its structure intuitive and invisible, his movies since Inception call attention to their structure and require frequent, heavy-handed exposition. (Despite these efforts, the “[Nolan movie] ending explained” genre on YouTube continues to thrive.)
Related: The Prestige uses, like many of Nolan’s movies before and since, non-linear storytelling. Again, it does so effortlessly and without calling attention to itself. More recent movies like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and most obviously and incomprehensibly Tenet use it as a flourish. When some critics wonder whether this kind of chronological tossed salad is necessary for these stories, they’re not being unreasonable.
I wouldn’t call The Prestige a special effects movie, but several sequences rely heavily on effects—Tesla’s lab, Angier’s transporter machine, and subtle shots of the Borden twins working together. They’re seamlessly integrated, even the digital effects Nolan now has a reputation for shunning. Nolan’s insistence on practical stuntwork and in-camera effects is laudable, but it sometimes feels—like the large format film—like a gimmick that is taking over his movies. Witness all the jokes online about Nolan finding real cyclopes or having his actors throw real thunderbolts for his Odyssey project.
Finally, The Prestige is rich, dense, intricately plotted, but tight, running just over two hours. With the exception of Dunkirk, which Nolan said he wanted to feel like the third act of a much larger story, every movie from The Dark Knight on has been two and a half hours long or longer. I like or love several of these, but the feeling of sprawl and self-indulgence is palpable, especially when the increasingly showy plots require multiple scenes of people talking about what’s going on for the audience’s benefit.
In short, The Prestige perfectly unites story and form. Nolan continues to make good movies, but with their increasing emphasis on spectacle, teasing structure, and technical gimmickry, he has never quite struck the same balance he did in The Prestige.
Again, these are note and observations. Perhaps more thoughts later, especially once I’ve finished rereading the novel and watched the movie again.
I’ll end by noting that Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, did an excellent job adapting Priest’s novel. This second reading impresses upon me more than the first just how difficult this story would be to construct for the screen. I’m glad they took the effort—and over several years, which I think may be yet another factor distinguishing The Prestige from the films since—because the story is brilliant, surprising, suspenseful, and moving, and deserved to be told well.
