The Illusionist; An Intriguing Character Trapped In Foolish Formula

Writer/Director Neil Burger creates a party mix of mostly poorly flavored plot amidst a potentially intriguing character study in “The Illusionist“. The former of which seems to be another consequence of the Hollywood culling machine.

Edward Norton, who again provides some moments of brilliance, plays, Eisenheim The Illusionist, a magician performing in Vienna during the Hapsburg Empire. His template nemesis is Crown Prince Leopold, played with some conviction by Rufus Sewell. Paul Giamanti has certifiably entered the pantheon of Hollywoods best and most consistent actors, and here, as Chief Inspector Uhl, he creates another character we’re empathetically connected to. The last of the main characters is Jessica Biel, as Norton’s soul mate, Sophie. I must confess I was not impressed with Biel’s performance, however, I don’t pin the fault on her alone.

So, we have an artist/genius in love with the woman engaged to a diabolical monarch. Brokering the relationship between these two men is a police inspector from the same class as the artist, but employed by the upper class, who promises new status if he acquiesces to the personal desires of the Monarch, despite the law.

The love story between the artist and his lover is typical and like the ENTIRE love story in this film, cliche`. There used to be a literary law that true love can only be tragic, Hollywood has killed that long ago. Here we have poor boy and rich girl in love as children, seperated by the troughs of social class, seperated for nearly two decades, reunited, small talk, love making, their past misfortunes reversed and vala!, they live happily ever after. And no, this is not an oversimplification, it really did feel and play out this way. It killed the film and devoured the plot.

So often it felt like Norton was playing two characters. There was one, the intrigueing artist, and the other, the man in love. Norton seemed none too comfortable with the latter and right at home with the former. He gravitates to the intellectually challenged man, whose only true nemisis’ in life are the ideas he must conquer or the ghosts invisible within. But as a lover, he fell flat on his face. It’s hard to understand exactly why, but I see an actor of Norton’s sensibility uninspired to sell himself these oversimplified and underdeveloped feelings. And the same goes for Biel, who did show more facial pangs of love than Norton, but still could not sell this “soulmate-rescue-me” script.

*Note: if one wants to view a great tragic love re-united story and unsurpassed acting, see The Count of Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu and Ornella Muti as Mercedes.

Ultimately the film’s thematic clash was the spiritual democracy vs. the autocratic monarch, played out in several tangents, manifested by which man would have Sophie (wisdom) in the end. And unfortunately, only a moral lesson is at play, rather than a beneficial harmony of reality and art. These doses of reality would have served this tensionless story well: Giamanti’s character was attempted to be rounded by consistently following out the Crown Prince’s orders, but we knew all along that his heart belonged to Eisenheim (Inspector Uhl is conveniently an amateur magician who seems to not possess the envy a man should in his shoes – a lower class butcher’s son under the thumb of the Monarch.) One is reminded of Mozart’s counterpart Salieri in Amadeus and how brilliantly this human envy was portrayed by F. Murray Abraham. Secondly, where was the soulful corruption that would have manifested by this point in Uhl’s career? He seemed to still possess the purity of the butcher’s son, yet he presumably had been working under a corrupt autocrat for years. If he was a man and not a saint, surely, there would have been some manifestation. If you swim in the ocean long enough you become a fish. It’s not Giamanti’s fault, the script just didn’t have it.

The script seems to be the culprit for the film’s crashing nothingness. It gives us a brilliant character in Norton who gives us three speeches that suggest the depth behind his genius: first on Time, second on the Soul, and lastly, on Power. All three of these themes play out before us; the timelessness of true love, the immortality of the soul as the lovers fake their death – feigning Romeo and Juliet, and how the true seat of Power is in the mind of a man, not his fist, as the artist, Eisenheim, outwits the brawn of autocrats and lawmakers. The spiritual democracy wins.

Coming away, I am unsatisfied with a film that offered so much, yet provided so little. I’ve raised my expectations on film: I want to be enlightened or taken back down to reality, and everything else – everytime I know exactly what a character will say or do – I just cannot help but see it as a greater reflection of the state of American art: product trumps the artist. I am dismayed that I feel this way given the respect I have for the artists involved in the film. They’ve all made it this far and I give them all the respect in the world for it, but where is the fearlessness? Why are there so few ground-breaking films when they seemingly know what it takes to break new ground? In this film, it’s all there, all the elements of a potentially great film, yet at every crossroad they walk on the path MOST taken, not the path of originality.

The film itself supports a spiritual democracy over an autocratic monarch, but seeing how the film time and again sold its substance to the dogma of cliché storytelling, I wonder the extent to which the creators truly understand what they are saying. Or if they do understand, but are just creatively dismantled by the financial powers that be, what does this say? It’s a dismal reality when art is not allowed to speak for itself, but rather speaks through the voicebox of financial gain. Who will ever know how much is lost, from the moments the writer compromises a line of dialogue to the moment a studio markets the tagline. We will never know how much is lost until we ourselves can look in the mirror and see what we have given up over a lifetime living under autocratic belief systems covered with sugary terms like democracy and freedom. Perhaps then we get the message of the movie, and then perhaps we may say, “fuck, they missed the point!” Make an audience member cry over seeing his dreams shattered on screen and maybe make him rethink things, but show him his greatest dreams realized on screen and you get a lazy, mindless consumer; the unbeknownst to himself benefactor of his own delusion. The Illusionist.