The Illusionist
PG, 109 mins

The great advantage of being Crown Prince Rufus Sewell of Austria is that you can murder your fiancée in the royal stables and no one can legally lay a finger on you. Even so, it’s slightly disconcerting when her ghost starts appearing at the local theatre every night at the bidding of The Illusionist.

Does Eisenheim have the power to raise the dead, or is he playing a lethal game with smoke and mirrors? Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) has the royal order to expose the sorcerer as a dangerous fraud, or he can kiss goodbye to the Lord Mayor’s job.

Background

• The Illusionist

• The Illusionist - Sunday Times review

• Jessica Biel: playing hard and fast

• Tricky business

The real international man of mystery

Kevin Maher speaks to Edward Norton, star of The Illusionist and an enigma in his spare time, about the art of impenetrability

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

This is Vienna, 1900, the most enlightened city in Europe. Yet the spooky pleasure of Neil Burger’s cranky thriller is the supernatural quality of the illusions. An orange pip grows into a tree under the heat of Eisenheim’s hand. A woman is dramatically beheaded by her own reflection. A shadowy child wanders towards the stage as insubstantial as air. A sword, balancing on its tip, defies the strongest officer in the royal ballroom to pick it up. This is meat and drink for a half-decent cameraman.

But the magic fails to stretch to the Mills & Boon script. Burger’s mad screen-play, based on a short story by the Pulitzer prize winning author Steven Millhauser, takes a very literal approach to melodrama. An orchestra of broody cellos follows Norton’s illusionist around Vienna as closely as Giamatti himself does. The policeman — an amateur enthusiast himself — can’t help admiring the maestro, even if his task is to put him behind bars. “I assure you, your secrets are safe with me,” dribbles Giamatti in his best Goebbels accent as he fiddles with the props.

He is, of course, the Salieri to Norton’s Paul Daniels. And quite unable to picklock an envelope if his job depended on it, which it does. The entire myth about Eisenheim unfolds from Giamatti’s enamoured perspective. But he has competition from Jessica Biel’s demure Duchess. Eisenheim may have been lost in China for 15 years, but it takes just three chaste minutes in the privacy of a coach to convince Biel that her mystery man — whom she once loved as a child — is worth ditching an empire for.

Norton looks tortured and old before his time as the humourless Eisenheim. There’s a bizarre flavour of Fight Club about the silent believers who turn up to his magic shows. Like Sean Penn he brings a monolithic intensity to a part that frankly needs just two ounces rather than eight kilos of tragic baggage.

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