Nolan’s sympathies appear to lie mainly with Borden, but as a director, he has sensibilities more in line with Angier’s. He disdains Angier’s crowd-pleasing antics in favor of a more stripped-down presentation, challenging his audience rather than charming or seducing it. Bale’s fierce inwardness likewise suits the character of Borden, a working-class striver (Angier is a slumming aristocrat) who is also something of a purist. Jackman, equally at home onstage and on screen, uses his lean, long-legged charisma to good effect. Their enmity stems from an accidental onstage killing, and before long it is hard for them to disentangle the desire for revenge from the impulse toward one-upmanship.Īngier and Borden perform competing versions of the same tricks in different theaters and show up at each other’s performances in disguise, sometimes to steal secrets, sometimes to sabotage tricks and cause public embarrassment.Īngier is the smoother performer, as much an actor as a prestidigitator, and Mr. They start out as friends and fellow apprentices, but quickly become bitter personal and professional rivals. At the center are two ambitious young magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), also known as the Professor. “The Prestige” begins with a death and proceeds through a murder trial and its aftermath, using flashbacks within flashbacks to deepen the mystery it promises to solve and changing points of view to misdirect our attention. It is a mock-gothic costume drama with more than a touch of Las Vegas extravagance, a larger-scale, flashier - if ultimately less haunting - relative of “The Illusionist,” another recent cinematic tale of 19th-century abracadabra. And “The Prestige” - the title is a magician’s term of art referring to the climactic surprise that seals a successful trick - manifests an enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of illusionism that is pretty much irresistible.

The point of a magic trick, after all, is not the content, whatever that might be, but the ingenuity of its conceit and the skill of its execution.

Like “Memento,” also directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a story by his brother, “The Prestige” is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance. Set in a stylized late-Victorian world of dueling music-hall magicians and diabolically clever inventors, it has a satisfyingly puzzlelike structure, zipping around in time and scattering clues throughout its busy scenes and frames.

Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, “The Prestige,” directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.

The prestige novel