Two Rival Magicians, and Each Wants the Other to Go Poof

Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, “The Prestige,” directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.

Set in a stylized late-Victorian world of dueling music-hall magicians and diabolically clever inventors, it has a satisfyingly puzzlelike structure, zipping around in time and scattering clues throughout its busy scenes and frames. Like “Memento,” also directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a story by his brother, “The Prestige” is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance.

The point of a magic trick, after all, is not the content, whatever that might be, but the ingenuity of its conceit and the skill of its execution. And “The Prestige” — the title is a magician’s term of art referring to the climactic surprise that seals a successful trick — manifests an enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of illusionism that is pretty much irresistible. It is a mock-gothic costume drama with more than a touch of Las Vegas extravagance, a larger-scale, flashier — if ultimately less haunting — relative of “The Illusionist,” another recent cinematic tale of 19th-century abracadabra.

“The Prestige” begins with a death and proceeds through a murder trial and its aftermath, using flashbacks within flashbacks to deepen the mystery it promises to solve and changing points of view to misdirect our attention. At the center are two ambitious young magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), also known as the Professor. They start out as friends and fellow apprentices, but quickly become bitter personal and professional rivals. Their enmity stems from an accidental onstage killing, and before long it is hard for them to disentangle the desire for revenge from the impulse toward one-upmanship.

Angier and Borden perform competing versions of the same tricks in different theaters and show up at each other’s performances in disguise, sometimes to steal secrets, sometimes to sabotage tricks and cause public embarrassment.

Angier is the smoother performer, as much an actor as a prestidigitator, and Mr. Jackman, equally at home onstage and on screen, uses his lean, long-legged charisma to good effect. Mr. Bale’s fierce inwardness likewise suits the character of Borden, a working-class striver (Angier is a slumming aristocrat) who is also something of a purist. He disdains Angier’s crowd-pleasing antics in favor of a more stripped-down presentation, challenging his audience rather than charming or seducing it.

Mr. Nolan’s sympathies appear to lie mainly with Borden, but as a director, he has sensibilities more in line with Angier’s. Much as he respects the rigor of close-hand trickery based on tried-and-true techniques, this filmmaker, whose other movies include “Insomnia” and “Batman Begins,” can hardly resist flights of theatrical and cinematic bravura.

Mr. Bale’s performance, in particular, is something to savor (especially in retrospect, when you at last understand just what he’s been up to), but the acting in “The Prestige” is, for the most part, subordinate to the plot twists and visual sensations. You don’t really go to a magic show to appreciate the commitment to emotional truth displayed by the lovely assistant as she’s being sawed in half. You go to be amazed that, after all the sawing, her body is still in one piece.

Which is as good a time as any to mention the presence of Scarlett Johansson as Angier’s (and then Borden’s) lovely assistant Olivia, one of several more or less unsuspecting parties caught up in the intrigue between the rivals. Ms. Johansson’s English accent is adequate, though she tends lately (here and in “The Black Dahlia”) to be upstaged by her costumes, which appear to be — inadvertently, I’m sure — cut a size too small.

Rebecca Hall plays Borden’s wife, who worries that his commitment to his craft exceeds his devotion to her and their young daughter. The ever-reliable Michael Caine does not exert himself unduly playing Angier’s engineer and manager, but then again, his job is to lull us with his wise, twinkly reassurance so that we don’t see the full dimensions of the story unfolding before us.

That story is nudged to its wildly curlicued ending — don’t worry, I won’t give it away — by David Bowie, whose dry, amusing impersonation of the inventor Nikola Tesla allows the film to brush up gently against the real world. Tesla’s fierce rivalry with Thomas Edison is alluded to, and it suggests an actual historical counterpart to Angier and Borden’s struggle for dominance.

Two inventors can hatch the same idea, just as two magicians can perform the same trick, but only one is likely to be remembered and rewarded, and his victory may depend on cunning, dirty tricks and luck as much as on merit. (A similar contest may now be under way between “The Prestige” and “The Illusionist.”)

Edison, of course, is one of the progenitors of motion pictures, and to cast him as an off-screen heavy is a nice bit of wit. Tesla, meanwhile, who works in an isolated laboratory in the Rocky Mountains, conjures the possibility of innovations that could make the old, mechanical stage magic obsolete, much as digital technology now threatens to supersede the handmade magic of cinema.

But Tesla — who is described as “a wizard” — also introduces an element into the movie that may trouble magic aficionados, whose commitment to techniques of deception is frequently accompanied by a rationalist skepticism toward claims of supernatural power. Serious magicians (like Ricky Jay, who has a cameo here) tend also to be determined debunkers. (Penn & Teller’s Showtime series, the title of which I can’t print here, is part of this tradition, as is Johnny Carson’s famous “Tonight” show humiliation of Uri Geller, who claimed to be able to bend spoons through telekinesis.)

But the Nolans, eager to push the boundaries of their jaw-dropping parlor trick, introduce an element of bunk that compromises the coherence of the film’s concept. At least I suspect that Alfred Borden might think so, which makes me wonder if the filmmakers might not agree. Their slyest move may be to divide “The Prestige,” already caught between two protagonists, against itself. Maybe, in the end, it all makes sense. Or maybe convincing you that it does is just the last and cleverest of this movie’s many sleights of hand.

“The Prestige” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some violent scenes and a scary, menacing atmosphere.

THE PRESTIGE

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Christopher Nolan; written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest; edited by Lee Smith; production designer, Nathan Crowley; produced by Emma Thomas and Aaron Ryder; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 128 minutes.

WITH: Hugh Jackman (Robert Angier), Christian Bale (Alfred Borden), Michael Caine (Cutter), Scarlett Johansson (Olivia), Piper Perabo (Julia McCullough), Rebecca Hall (Sarah Borden), David Bowie (Tesla) and Andy Serkis (Alley).