The Illusionist

Loosely based on Steven Millhauser's haunting, yet nearly plotless, short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," writer-director Neil Burger's "The Illusionist" comes off as, if anything, excessively plotted. Burger captures the feel of Vienna on the cusp of the 19th Century and he also captures several very fine performances, but what he regretfully loses is the wonderment of Millhauser's story, a respect for the unknown that's essential for most magical tales.

After an extended flashback to lay the groundwork for the plot, Edward Norton pops up as Eisenheim, a magician who arrives in Vienna and soon attracts the attentions of the city's Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), an amateur conjurer himself, and of Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), a pragmatic realist and magic debunker. He also reunites with his former love Sophie (Jessica Biel), a Countess betrothed to the Crown Prince. Soon, Uhl's curiosity becomes professional, when Eisenheim becomes involved with an apparent murder.

"The Illusionist" begins with an iris-in and its visual grammar is full of tricks gleaned from the earliest days of cinema. The idea of a society on the cusp of modernity is central to Burger's theme, as is the idea that the rise of cinema was directly responsible for a certain loss of innocence, that the Lumiere machines ushered in an era in which mechanical reproduction rendered illusion unremarkable.

And, truthfully, merely putting this story on film drains some of its magic. Burger has said that great effort was put into recreating Eisenheim's tricks as they would have been performed at the time and that CGI was only used to touch up certain things. But who would know? Eisenheim makes an orange tree sprout from nothing on stage and we see blueprints suggesting how the stunt might have been engineered, but since it so obviously includes an extra layer of cinematic trickery, Burger might as well be showing us a computer generated ape. Viewers cannot get caught up in Eisenheim's act, so the connection wanes.

Interest is also strained by the fact that Burger's means of adapting Millhauser's story was to graft an utterly conventional love triangle and murder mystery onto what was initially just a tale of a man whose explorations into the unseen world left him unable to exist in the real world. The story is about ineffable things, but the police procedural aspects of "The Illusionist" make it all too effable. Burger's plot twists are all too familiar and they take time from developing the character of Eisenheim.

Burger reduces most of Eisenheim's misery to his love for Sophie, leading to a shockingly one-note performance from Norton. The normally reliable actor has the magician's physicality, but he never varies his sour expression, while the Pan-European accent stymies him. Biel's accent is actually much more consistent and since the beautifully angular actress is required merely to show yearning and the blush of love, she carries it off nicely. The film's best performances comes from Giamatti -- voice and mannerisms entirely altered -- and from Sewell, always compelling however stock the villainous role.

Thanks to cinematographer Dick Pope and production designer Ondrej Nekvasil, "The Illusionist" has a look that goes far beyond the constraints of its low budget to capture fin de siecle Vienna, but what good is all that technical rigor, when it's just in service of a clunky, conventional thriller?