Visible Prestige

After consuming numerous scones, cherry-cream filled puffs, and cucumber sandwiches - not to mention the large cups of tea - I feel fully authorized to say that The Prestige  is better than  The Prestige. In fact, it was mildly awesome. It's going to be a little hard to review the movie without re-reviewing the book, but I'm going to make an attempt. The Movie review itself should be fairly spoil-free, but I'm afraid that when I follow it with a comparison of book and movie, details will be divulged. With that being said, onward! 

The Movie:

              The opening scene (which, due to technical difficulties, I got to see three or four times) sets the slightly dark, tension-charged mood. It defines the three parts of a magic trick – the pledge, the turn, and the prestige – while letting you know that the story, in and of itself, is a trick. And not necessarily a nice one, we feel, as the voice over fades and we see Alfred Borden being framed and then charged with the murder of Robert Angier. Let me take this moment to mention actors: up until, oh, a few years ago I knew nothing about actors. I knew Harrison Ford, Richard Dean Anderson, and Patrick Stewart by name and could recognize a handful of other people but had no idea who they were. I have slowly been fixing this problem. My point is, though, that the actors that they picked for this movie were known even to me, and I think if someone had told me these two actors were going to be in one movie together I would have saw it in theaters when it first came out. After all, who wouldn't pay serious money to see Batman and Wolverine at the same time. 

As enemies. 

          Exactly. But back to the actual review, the movie starts us off at the "end" of the story and then uses Angier's journal to bring us back to the beginning. Now, I'm going to have to have Bevity confirm this, because I was too busy going "wait, that's not what happened in the book" to really pay attention, but even though the movie continually cuts back and forth between Angier and Borden reading each other's journals, they are not, in fact, reading them at the same time. That is, Borden is, for our purposes, reading Angier's journal in the present, while Angier is reading in the past.  The movie does a beautiful job of blending these narratives together, taking us back to the when their enmity started and following them both as they struggle for resolution. I was pleasantly surprised by how much acting the women in the movie got to do too, since the book really only made Angier's wife seem like a living person. Though, admittedly, the girls spent most of the movie in the victorian equivalent to a bikini. (excuse: stage clothes. In fact, in a hilarious juxtaposition of impressions, they often looked more dressed at home in their  . . . . chemises, then on the stage in costume. Weird, huh?).

         I was most delighted by the way the movie was able to keep the hate between Angier and Borden alive. You never really wondered why two grown men were still harping at each other like children, and when you grew a little aghast at what they were willing to do to each other (and themselves), you had a whole little pile of seriously nasty precedents as an explanation. That was what shocked me the most about this movie - aside from the major plot changes of course - it was not afraid to get its hands dirty and, because of it's very nature of grit and suspense, none of the violence was pretty. This isn't gladiator, with death choreographed and blood painted on after to make the action pop a little. This movie has birds being crushed, hands being mangled (three of them), suicide, and more drownings than  it cared to show (but it does show two). I don't mind goblins being beheaded, but this kind of "real life accident" turns my blood a little green, and if you are anything like that you might want to watch this movie with a friend who will tell you when you can open your eyes again (and then laugh at you loudly. Because that's what friends are for). That won't help you get over the main point of the movie, though, which is to horrify you. This isn't The Ring, but the build up at the beginning, and the revelation at the end, is engineered to make your hair stand on end - even if you already know what's coming.

So, scoring:

Plot: After a miraculous surgery, the crash victim walks once more across the stage of her beauty pageant. Her gait is unhampered and graceful, her dress is gorgeous without being distracting to the event, and her words are delivered with such confident, casual poise that you know she's practiced them for hours in order to get them just right. Everything just flows really well, and no one can doubt her motivation. Logic with legato - it works if you like beauty pageants. 

Content: Death, gunshot wound, knife wound (which we get to see), corsets, yadayadayada. The content moves this out of the kids section, but the plot would have done that even if all the violence was taken off stage. Obviously, being a prude, I think there was a (non-gruesome) scene or two that was unnecessary, but I can also admit that the story was so fast, and so focused on the men, using more screen time to show affection in a less invasive way would have thrown off the pacing.   

In summary, I could probably watch this movie again with someone who had never seen it before, but the characters weren't likable enough to merit any kind of emotional attachment, and in the end the little birds still die.  

The Book and the Movie (Spoiler Version):

Angier's wife is dead. Okay, yes, Borden never goes to prison in the book either. But Angier's wife is dead. In the book the enmity between Angier and Borden is started when Borden, in a fit of stupidity  conscientiousness, disrupts Angier's seance. Borden later feels sorry and tries to apologize ("later," as in, like, six months after the event) but Angier's reply is filled with bitter rage. This is understandable, since what Borden doesn't know, and actually never knows, is that when he disrupted Angeir's play he caused Mrs. Angier to miscarry. The pain Angier feels from this is palatable but . . . . . it goes no where. The book allows him to be more concerned about his wife than revenge, and then before you know it a year or two has passed, and then five, and then he suddenly has three happy kids and - hey, Borden's getting famous? Well, we can't have that - lets tune up the enmity again. 

               The movie changes this, not so much by giving us a "worse" death, but by radically revising Angier's reaction to it, and reducing the amount of time he has to react in. When Borden causes Angier's wife to drown ( accidentally, but with a lot more premeditation than was in the book), Angier responds by shooting him in the hand. Yeah. Not good for a magician. So Borden's successful counter-attempts to sabotage Angier's own performances are understandable, if no less admirable. Getting Angier's wife out of the picture changes his character in other ways too. Besides making his war with Borden a kind of continued declaration of his love, it brings Angier's relationship with Olivia to a place I can understand. In the book Angier meets Olivia when he is at the height of his success and is happily married with kids. In the movie neither of the magicians reach anything like real fame and Angier is consumed, not with bliss, but with revenge. He's attracted to Olivia, but he's married to Borden's complete destruction and will not be found unfaithful. Argh! The more I look at the movie Angier and the book Angier the more obvious it becomes that they are two completely different people. Neither of them are good at seeing the prestige of a trick, but one is intelligent in other ways, and has a dark side to his character that makes sense. When the Big Reveal happens in the book you're kind of like "Angier did that? No, not quiet little Angier." But movie Angier: we see the corrosion of his soul. When his Big Reveal comes it fits right in with his other acts - more horrifying only as the last act of a show is more spectacular than the first. And the fact that Angier's prestige in the movie is more whole, and therefore requires more blackness of soul to preform, makes more sense to the modern reader than the book's half prestige, which comes across as disney magic for being so stringless. 

                So what about Borden? I still think he's a megalomanic. He's willing to maim himself in order to protect his secret, and he watches his wife drink herself into suicide, which is unforgivable. But the movie does a much better job of splitting his character, and, once split, we find we are able to define him. Once defined then understood, and we can feel for the man who apologizes to Angier for his wife's death, even while wanting to shake the man who caused it in the first place with his pride. A lot of his attacks from the book become counter-attacks in the movie, which helps him look like the misunderstood protagonist that he sort of becomes. Why he wouldn't just tell his own wife the secret, when it was obvious even half way through the movie that,  though she didn't know, she knew, neither of the Christophers can answer, and I will always think of it as this story's Achilles' heel. 

                   I'm not sure how I feel about him walking free at the end. Yes, he's half the man he was, but he's still alive while Angier is very, very dead. However the fact that a) Borden never tried to kill Angier (before), even when not his most moral self; and b) he has a daughter to take care of - a symbol of a bright and simple future - while Angier never had anything but revenge, not even Olivia, makes me willing to call it a redemption story and back away.  I still feel Borden "deserved" to die, but seeing that he did – and seeing his reaction to Angier's prestige –  I'll concede he was no worse than a dozen other movie heros who I have cheered on. As the story proclaims: presentation is everything.  

The Prestigious Pantomime

I bought The Prestige on a whim during The Great Borders Purge. I had seen the movie and liked it. However it sat for months on my shelf untouched, so I suggested it for the Book Brigade to force myself to read it. This review is mostly spoiler free. As I said, I saw the movie first so my expectations were high. The book begins with a dull character in modern times, he was pointless and vague. I waved him away as necessary to the introducing the epistolary part of the novel. Then the real story started.

The first section of the story is told through the autobiography of one of the main characters, Borden. After a dry, lengthy depiction of his childhood the Feud is introduced. It is started accidentally by Borden who does something well meaning and seemingly harmless, and after Angier retaliates with a few small pranks it feels like it should be over. The bulk of this narrative is concerned with Borden giving you his theory on magic and not revealing to his secret which he has oh so cleverly kept for all these years. The most interesting bits of this section were when Borden explains the pact between audience and magician, and then goes on to tell you that this pact is in play in his memoirs, because he is lying to support an illusion. The parts where the illusion cracks and the lie shines through are marvelous, and if you don’t know the answer to the riddle you probably will think Borden quite mad. But then for absolutely no reason they return to the feud, a feud devoid of any cause for malice or anger. And their feud is mild, apathetic almost, they play a few tricks on each other. Borden is petty and obsessive, but seems too self-interested to plausibly continue antagonizing Angier without personal gain. They seem to be feuding merely to entertain themselves rather than out of the voracious spite they both claim.

When we hear Angier’s side of the story we are given a little justification for the feud, but he responds un-viciously, as if he does not really want to cause trouble. Angier at first seems to be a nicer person. He is gullible and earnest and a little weak minded, this sometimes masquerades as innocence and sometimes as pure idiocy. He is not particularly angered by Borden’s continued attacks and at one point attempts to abandon the feud. I suppose the real problem is that the characters never drive the feud and so it doesn’t really feel like a feud at all. When it finally ends, it is merely by accident. The characters simply go along with the events of the story instead of being the ones moving it.

Then there’s Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson. She manages to completely ruin the small amount of respectability remaining to both of the main characters. While both of the main characters are built mostly on flaws, they share the good quality of being lovingly devoted to their respective wives, and you hope for happy redemption or reconciliation of some kind. But then Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson comes along and deprives them, one after the other, of their only admirable quality. I don’t mind flawed characters as long as their flaws are there to shape them into something interesting and propel their story, I don’t even mind entirely rotten characters who are only self serving, but I do mind characters who are just pathetic and despicable out of a lack of concern or purpose. They are just following the story, they have no real motivations. It is the same problem with the feud, the characters are not weakly written, but they are weak, weak in will, weak in action. They do not stand for anything, they are not trying to accomplish anything they merely exist.

In between all this we are taken back to the perspective of the characters in modern times from the introduction. It seems like a completely irrelevant interruption until something truly horrific and shocking springs out of the middle. It is so sudden, so jarring, and so pointless, and so utterly awful. This thing is made doubly horrifying and by the fact that it has no discernable purpose. When we are taken to the modern characters at the very end of the novel, we continue in this extremely disturbing vein, slowly piling on the creepiness until at last the Author leaves on the last page with nothing but sheer terror.

Conclusion: While there are many things that irritate me about this novel: the fact that (spoilers) Angier’s mustache is never mentioned until we are introduced to a roomful of his frozen corpses, the Author giving long-winded accounts of each characters’ childhood as part of their introduction, and the failure by the Author to piece together any of the themes he laid out; the two mysteries are very masterfully and elegantly handled*, even through the difficult epistolary medium, which sometimes strains the narrative. But this novel loses out of sheer disturbing creepiness.

*Another high point is Hesketh Unwin. A background character if ever I saw one, but he wins the Most Awesome Name Ever award.

The Illusion of Prestige

                 I started The Prestige thinking it would be pure fiction. That is,  I thought it would describe the life and actions of made up people doing made-up, but presumably plausible, things. Halfway through the book I had established it in my mind as the tale of the two squabbling magicians: a drama mixed with a little mystery and carrying the possibility of romance in the inevitable reconciliation of the two families. Instead The Prestige is a science fiction novel in the early strain – more the horror of Frankenstein* than the sociology of the Foundation series – but this isn't revealed to the unsuspecting reader until they are more than halfway through the book. Before that they have to meet the main characters, which takes longer than normal since the book is made up of five acts with each character in charge of introducing themselves. This was slightly different than normal and, as a stylistic choice, handled perfectly. In the average book we are given only one point of view, and though this limits us a little if we are reading a political novel, we can still tell what's happening because, though the characters color things a bit, they do not lie about actual events. But here the  characters with the largest presence, the magicians Alfred Bolden and Rupert Angier, twist facts and events to suit themselves. It's the perfect format for deception.

The widely different ways in which events are revealed does little to instill confidence in the narrators' sanity, but Bolden and Angier would be candidates for institutionalization anyway in my book. Only a dozen pages into Bolden's account I had already committed him to the loony bin due to his bizarre use of grammar and habit of, shall I say, talking to himself. Then I guessed his secret and had to grudgingly admit he was awful clever. In the end, however, it is  his precious secret which condemns him. He makes quite a lot of it in his own account – now I show you my hands, and all that – which give you a hint of his megalomania (I don't use this word lightly here, he really has a disturbing need to be superior, and his secret is how he satisfies this need). Bolden says he had thought of his marvelous act, and therefore his deception,  while still at home. But for a man to continue the joke of a sixteen year old boy? It's not funny Bolden, just ask your wife. His wife. Oh, wait.

Not that Angier is any better. From the start he only seems slow and a little Monkish – the New York variety, not the kind that meditates. I actually felt for him great sympathy at first, because of the consequences of Bolden's actions against him and because, naturally, of his great happiness. What can I say, I find happily married men attractive. But there's nothing more pathetic than a happiness that ends, and Angier proves that to really mess up a life you have to be the one living it. Questions of morality aside – neither of these men are particularly admirable in regards to their wives, but you feel it more with Angier because Bolden is so deucedly distant –  I can not shake the feeling that Angier is a small man who really would have been better at home collecting orchids, or whatever it is harmless members of the British aristocracy do. He proves me wrong not when he comes up with the (ludicrous) idea of In a Flash - the idea which completely dissolves the solid base of an interesting, if not endearing, fiction –  but with how he handles the prestige. It makes my skin crawl with his callousness. You see, the word "prestige" in the title is actually used as a noun by Priest.  It's where he reveals that his drama is actually a thriller. Prestige is a horrid euphemism which my dictionary tells me is perfectly fitting. Prestige: a feeling based on the favorable perception of another's achievement. A word deriving most recently from the French word for illusion, but ultimately from the Latin praestgiae, conjuring trick. It is through his prestige(s) that Angier gains his prestige, and then, through fate's justice, losses all ability to enjoy it.

                      This brings me to a point where I must confess my own short comings: I like happy endings. Not only do I like them, but I feel that 99% of all books, movies, or TV shows that end tragically could have been saved with some unicorns and pixie dust. I would rather have a deus ex machina than that strange feeling of the unresolved. To me, a story that does not end happily – or, in the case of science fiction, in some state of contentment – can have no real resolution. A book without resolution is a book without end, and a book without end is like a hang nail that's long enough to catch painfully on your clothes and hair but too short to easily cut. Without completely spoiling the book, for the greatest pleasure you'll get from it is in discovering its secrets,  I can tell you that, though both Angier and Bolden die, there is no reason to conclude that any of them are actually dead.** They are both, however, perfectly wretched and twisted by their bitterness. Sunshine? The book ends at night. Rainbows? At night, in the snow. Warm fuzzys? We leave Kate and Andrew standing in the door way with the physical equivalent of a corpse. Sorry Priest. I enjoyed reading about magic and the world of magicians, and I'm really looking forward to seeing your illusions on screen, but your characters weren't very nice chaps and Kate, easily my favorite character, makes no sense unless she knows far more than she is telling. Did you mean to end the book there, or did you just run out of twists? 

Originality: Pretty good. 

Characters: They seem nice and normal, but it's all smoke and mirrors. 

Plot: Slow to start, fast to end. Tied up with a bow and then ripped to shreds in the blender and used as wet confetti.

Content: I'm citing this book for non-descriptive nudity and inducing horror without warning***

* Okay, this really isn't fair to Frankenstein, which is a legitimate look at society in its own right, but the parallels between Frankenstein and The Prestige are overwhelming.  Even the monster's mournful "He is dead who brought me into being" and the following attempt at suicide is mirrored in Preist's books - only, Shelly was content to have made her point while I'm not quite sure what Preist's point even was.  

** Okay, I admit, this is my favorite thing from the book:  "Now I show you my hands . . . . I roll up my sleeves . . . ."  

*** Sudden genre switching is one of the cardinal sins of writing, right up there with having characters act out of character. 

Welcome Internet!

Sixer: Hello World, and welcome to Sock and Spoons.

Bevity: The.

Sixer: Yes, the Socks and Spoons.

Bevity: Brigade.

Sixer: Whatever. Anyway, welcome to our humble outpouring of . . .

Bevity: Geniusness. And, can we explain that this is a book blog?

Sixer: Yes, I was just getting to that. Our plan is to read a book a month - and watch a gazilion movies - and then review them.

Bevity: Here's a real introduction: Welcome Internet! These are the fabulous and spectacularly intelligent musings of Bevity and Sixer on various novels and films of interest. We will be reading and reviewing monthly for at least until we get bored.

Sixer: Or realize we're boring. So, do you want to intorduce our first victim, or shall I?

Bevity: You've already read it, so you do it.

Sixer: Oh, I wasn't really going to admit to that. But oh well, fine. We chose January's book based on Bevity's recommendation, since the movie is - apparently - briliant.

Bevity: Chritopher Nolan never fails to amaze. Christopher Nolan is Pixar for grownups. He's the writer-director of Inception, Batman Begins, Dark Knight . . . .

Sixer: Geek. Moving on. After years of ripping apart movies which failed to live up to the books they were based on, we might have actually found one that improves upon its source material. I don't know, I've only just read the book and haven't actually watched the movie yet. But I'm really hoping the movie is better. Really, really, really, hoping.

Bevity: I guess we'll just have to see. I just want to clarify that not all the movies we review will be based on the book of the month. Also not all posts will be based in logic or have anything to do with what we've just said.