Cinema Magic

This afternoon, I went to see The Illusionist. I've found that most people I've talked to have never heard of this movie, so here's the nutshell description:

Edward Norton plays a stage magician at the turn of the century in Vienna. You are at times meant to wonder whether everything he does is truly just an act, or whether he does actually possess supernatural powers. He is in love with a woman (Jessica Biel), and this brings him into conflict with the Crown Prince (Rufus Sewell, of Dark City), who dispatches a police inspector (Paul Giamatti) to deal with him.

It's definitely an "independent film" in the vein of the most classic expectations conjured up by that term. Slow pacing. Lush scenery. Heavy emphasis on performance by the actors. Everything but Eddie Izzard's "arranging matches" scene.

The film is not outstanding, but it is good. And, as performances are king in movies of this sort, it is helpful that the performances here are quite good -- though not in a "showy" sort of way. The main flaw in the movie is that it telegraphs information to the audience too clearly. It takes too seriously the old adage that "that which becomes important in act three must be glimpsed by the audience in act one or two." That's an adage I completely believe in, by the way. But there's an unfortunate lack of subtlety here, and any regular movie-goer will likely reason out the entire course of the story by a little after the halfway mark.

Sometimes, though, getting exactly what you expect is not a bad thing. So I give the film a B-. I don't expect this will make any critic's "top 10 list" come year's end, but there's certainly a lot of good work here.