Ben Witherington / The Prestige

One movie I haven't seen yet, but which I'm looking forward to very much, is The Prestige, starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. It deals with magic, honesty, the question of what's real. I was reminded of the movie today when I read a very interesting post on it at Ben Witherington's blog. Here's a little of the post. To read it all go here.

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... There are in fact three parts to any good magic trick-- the pledge in which you show the audience something, the turn, in which you take it away, make it vanish or the like, and 'the prestige' where you bring it back, unharmed, seemingly miraculously. It is of course an illusion, but human psychology is such that it is infinitely fascinating, at least to a lot of us ...

The heart of the movie is about two magicians in Victorian England just before the turn of the twentieth century who are bitter rivals. Each tries to steal each others secret and best tricks, and both lead lives full of secrets, illusions, tricks, sleights of hand, one could even say double lives ...

But in order to be a good magician you must be a master of deception of various sorts. Things are not ever quite what they seem, and the movie explores what happens when life imitates art and the deception bleeds over into the daily lives of the characters played so ably by Jackman and Bales. Michael Caine is his usual Cockney self played to the hilt as the sponsor of one of the magicians. Each strives to achieve a more and more stupendous trick at great cost--- one loses his wife, and the other loses, well 'hocus pocus' (which comes from 'Hoc est meum corpum'--- This is my body), I'd best not say ...

What happens however to the soul of a person who lives a life shrouded in secrets and secrecy, where deception becomes second nature, and duplicity is part of the game? Do they become pathological liars? Does it lead to mystery or to double lives? Is it really worth the price of admission just to live an intriguing life? This movie explores all of this in a coy sort of way, but there are moments when you realize that while even death can be counterfeited and occasionally cheated, the only life worth living is a true and honest one ...

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