10 Years Later, THE PRESTIGE Is Still Christopher Nolan's Best Film
Christopher Nolan's The Prestige premiered ten years ago today, on October 20, 2006. Despite the fact that he's directed more critically acclaimed movies since then, I'm here to make the case that The Prestige remains his best work.
Yes, his Batman trilogy is largely great (the first two movies are terrific, but let's face it, The Dark Knight Rises isn't nearly as good). Yes, Inception is amazing (I love that movie so much, I have a framed poster of it on my wall). But The Prestige contains all of the themes Nolan loves to explore in his films: tragic loss, a man's quest for knowledge, that quest serving as an obstacle to love, enduring unimaginable sacrifice, and, most importantly, obsession. Not only that, but the way he plays with time here is a more refined version of what he did in his breakout movie, Memento; while that film will forever be defined solely by its unique structure, The Prestige uses its own non-linear structure (which cleverly mirrors a magic trick, as laid out by Michael Caine's Cutter) as simply another tool to effectively tell its story, allowing for a powerful (and somewhat horrifying) twist ending that makes you want to immediately watch the whole movie again.
(Side note: I can understand why some people check out of this movie when they realize there's a supernatural twist, but though it's inarguably one of the most "out there" facets of Nolan's filmography, I still think it works on both a storytelling and emotional level.)
Hugh Jackman delivers the second-best performance of his career (I think this one ranks just below his transcendent work in The Fountain), and Christian Bale is equally excellent, but this is not a movie content with sitting back and letting its actors do the bulk of the work. Wally Pfister's gorgeous cinematography, Nathan Crowley's elegant production design, Lee Smith's savvy editing...all unite in service of the movie's enthralling script, which Nolan and his brother Jonathan (now the co-showrunner of Westworld) adapted from Christopher Priest's 1995 novel.
There's a meta aspect of storytelling involved here as well. When Inception came out, a popular reading theorized that the movie was a metaphor for filmmaking, with each of the individual characters representing a different member of a film crew (Cobb is the director, Ariadne is the production designer, etc). Inception may have been the film in which Nolan hammered down that metaphor more directly than anywhere else in his filmography, but those seeds are there in The Prestige as well, just in a less obvious way. In one of my favorite scenes, Nolan draws a direct parallel between writing a film and constructing a magic trick. Jackman's Robert Angier pulls off his version of The Transported Man using a double, but in order to do that, the real Angier falls through a trap door in the stage, forced to invisibly take a bow underneath as the "fake" version receives rapturous applause from the audience. A film's writer, one of the key architects of the "magic" of the movie, is also often left behind the scenes and rarely able to receive the credit he or she deserves.
Nolan has certainly made more ambitious movies than The Prestige (Interstellar, I'm lookin' at you), but looking back on this film ten years after its debut, I still don't think he's made a better one.