August 08, 2006
the illusionist
The kind of film that gives literariness a worse name, The Illusionist was once a Steven Millhauser story. Now it's a period piece in which fin-de-siecle Vienna is inexplicably denoted by marginally teutonized British accents, the audible sign that Ed Norton, Paul Giammati and Rufus Sewell are Acting (Jessica Biel settles for Great Plains British, both more and less annoying); the Shakespearean allusions reveal the script's self-aware intelligence; and the stilted, awkward pacing of each scene indicates both seriousness and historicity. If one imagined a film that was nothing more nor less than a set of signs referring back to its own quality, it might look a lot like this one — especially if you added a closing Usual Suspects-type montage in which the detective, having been led about by the beard for two hours, suddenly twigs to the entire array of clues in a swirling montage so as to understand "the plot," ostensibly by way of standing in for the audience members who, contrarily, got all that shit an hour ago and are wondering what time it is, whether this film is a particularly cruel explanation of the idea that "you have to suffer for art," and whatever became of the Rufus Sewell of Dark City.
Posted by jane at August 8, 2006 08:18 AM | TrackBack