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There were two major motion pictures in 2006 about the lives and loves of Victorian-era stage magicians: The Illusionist and The Prestige. Both of these movies set up a mystery whose solution is revealed only at the end of the film; both of these movies also cheat to reach their respective solutions, albeit in different ways. Looking at how they cheat may tell us something interesting about the implicit contract between audience and auteur (or maybe not, but writing about movies is fun . . .).
(It goes without saying that we are entering spoiler territory, so the squeamish should avert their eyes, lest they learn too much.)
The Illusionist stars Edward Norton as a magician with a plan to rescue his long-lost love, a noblewoman played by Jessica Biel, from the clutches of a depraved and dissipated crown prince, whose interests are enforced by his chief of police, played by Paul Giamatti. The film is a fantastic period piece, effectively re-creating the feel of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Norton is great as an intense and enigmatic magician, and Giamatti does a good job with his gruff inspector role. On the not-so-positive side, there is a surprising lack of chemistry between Biel and Norton, the story is pretty shmaltzy, and Jessica Biel's lips are botoxed well past the point of prudence.
More distressing is the cinematic sleight of hand pulled by directors Neil Burger and Bob Yari. The film's climax reveals the clever plan crafted by Norton to rescue his beloved Biel from the life of luxury which awaits her as the bride-to-be of the boorish crown prince. Up to this point we the viewers had been suckered into believing that Biel had been murdered in a fit of drunken rage by the prince, that Norton had summmoned her spirit in his onstage act, and that Norton himself had entered the spirit realm during his final performance. It turns out that the two have actually fled the city for a rustic getaway in the Alps (where presumably Norton will take up a successful career in animal husbandry, and where Biel will find productive employment as a milk maid).
Now, I have no problem with the byzantine complexity of Edwards' crafty plan. It is a clever and semi-plausible solution a professional bamboozler like Norton might come up with when the chips are down and he needs to get out of Dodge. This is exactly the sort of clever deus-ex-machina that would end the film with a simultaneous sense of surprise and relief.
The problem is rather with the set-up itself. In the resolution, we are made to believe that Biel's death was faked and that all of the spiritualism and associated hocus pocus to which we were earlier subjected was but a clever illusion. Fine. The problem is, what we were shown before-hand is in no way consistent with this revelation. Norton's onstage feats simply could not have been created by a stage magician, howsoever skilled. These tricks included such numbers as spectral images of people which moved around freely, in some cases quite literally through the members of the audience. Such interactive holograms are possible only on film, not onstage. You can project an image onto a surface, but you can't make one run through people without the image being distorted somehow. Similarly, a trick in which Norton causes an orange tree to rapidly grow from a seed placed into a small ceramic planter was brought to us, the viewers of the film, via the magic of CGI--a process presumably unavailable to Norton's Victorian-era prestidigitator.
I, for one, felt cheated. The resolution of the film felt phoney, because it was frankly not consistent with what we the audience had earlier been shown. This problem could have been solved, if the directors of the film had simply restrained their impulse to "go digital," and had presented effects, howsoever amazing, which were yet within the power of a skilled stage magician. Instead, we were treated with a special effects version of the old bait-and-switch. For shame.
A bait-and-switch of a different kind marrs an otherwise engaging morality tale of envy and obsession in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. The Prestige stars Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as rival magicians whose professional and personal rivalry spirals out of control until it eventually consumes both themselves and their loved ones. Like The Illusionist, The Prestige attempts to build tension through crafting an intriguing mystery whose solution is revealed at the end in a thrilling climax. Unfortunately, the narrative burden created by Nolan is too heavy for him to lift without resorting to a cheesy science-fiction kluge. The audience is insufficiently prepared for this narrative chicanery; we are expecting the same sort of physically possible solution which The Illusionist ineptly tries to deliver. In fact, one-half of the mystery does give way to such a clever if mundane solution, but it is a solution which this audience member saw coming well in advance, and which sits all-too-awkwardly with the magic and mystery Nolan uses to blunder his way through the other half of the resolution.
More's the pity, since both films have many strengths, including some fine performances, engaging dialogue, and excellent art direction. It's just that, at the end of the day, the biggest trick of all proves to be the one pulled on the hapless audience member, who is left feeling less like the satisfied customer of a masterful stage magician, and more like the deluded victim of a cunning con man.