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Surely there are plenty of reasons that Nolan’s “reveal” could have been meant to surprise the audience rather than it be intentional on the part of the director as part a conclusion which was increasingly “obvious”, as you put it, Hellbunny, as the film progressed? With three sufficiently famous leads there would have been I assume a far greater degree of studio pressure to make the film’s narrative as maximally intelligible to the greatest possible audience. For that matter Nolan could have had less control of the source material than he assumed, or been too ambitious with the themes he introduced, or just had an “off” film. I loved the skill employed in Memento, I don’t think that means Nolan is now incapable of producing a film with a lesser degree of subtlety or narrative ambiguity.
If you want to look, it's there to be seen, not guessed. I kind of like that there are people out there who don't like to look, and I'm not belittling them.
I believe the point Miss W was making, not meaning to speak on their behalf, was that this attitude does come across as very near to belittling. You are capable of “seeing” the clues as certain indicators of an overall design while others don’t see that design, but that’s because they’re choosing not to look, because if they did look they’d see it. Because it’s so obvious. If they’d just look. You are sort of fudging it a bit, I think, by saying that people who don’t see the same evidence that you do are choosing not to use their perception, when presumably the truth of the matter is that some people choose to approach films, differently to you, in that they have little desire to work out the film’s structure from partial clues embedded throughout the film’s progress, and others do approach films with narrative puzzles and attempt to work them out with varying degrees of success or confirmation.
A trick ending wouldn’t be interesting unless there was evidence for it throughout the film, just as making the evidence too obvious reduces the impact of the trick. I think it is meant to be a trick ending, because of the way the “evidence” that an inquiring audience would be looking for is presented, because of the way that the film recaps things the audience could perhaps have assumed but not confirmed (eg Borden on Borden finger mutilation), and the reason I found the “trick” largely unexciting was that in finding the conclusion a confirmation of what I suspected, rather than a surprise, I didn’t appreciate that there were any other realistic possibilities. By the end of the film I don’t think, unlike in The Usual Suspects, that there were any other candidates for the “reveal”, while throughout the film Fallon was lingered on as a mystery tied to Borden, but not directly revealed, meaning that there were little grounds for doubt that he’d be tied to the revelation, or that it wasn't meant to be a revelation. Given that it’s a film that relies on misdirection, on the “turn”, I thought this element was absent, crucially, from what became the central mystery of a film, which, to just rub it in, went on to explain how they did the bloody trick!
You could also add Caine’s opinion, for what it’s worth, on what Nolan is doing after seeing it up close:
"But what you don't realize when you're watching these magicians doing all of these tricks, is that there's an invisible magician at work, and that's Christopher Nolan. He's doing 'a pledge, a turn and the prestige' without you knowing it, until the end. The whole movie is one big magic trick.".
Which, if you are going to accept that that’s what the film is doing, or trying to do, links to what I was saying above about the film (which I and those I went with generally enjoyed) being dissatisfying insofar at it attempts to follow the structure of the magic trick it strongly references. Unless of course I have been tricked by Teh Great Nolan in some unseen away, but with my limited film-watching skills I don’t see any evidence for it. If the Fallon reveal is the misdirection, then I don’t know what the real trick was, except that I didn’t find the result, the prestige if you will, sufficiently captivating.
The problem, for me, personally, was that 1) the evidence was presented in what - I found - to be a visually straightforward way, which I’ll admit I was forewarned about somewhat by reading the novel 2) more significantly, I felt that partly because the evidence seemed so linear the result of the twist or trick at the close of the film was unsatisfying because it seemed to me to lead to a “closed” conclusion and where the route or journey didn’t seem, however complicated, elegant enough 3) more significantly again, I didn’t find that because of that Nolan made the culmination of the film dramatically interesting - to me.
What I’d even suggest, a little more tentatively, is that those viewers who do not confirm their opinions while the film is ongoing remain more open to a greater degree of non-linearity in the structure of films, which I think could be argued was something that The Prestige was lacking. Incidentally, this view might admittedly be only argued by me at this point, so feel free to ignore this post and the one a little further up entirely - but did no one at all catch the first few words of the film? Again, I think it’s before Caine’s early monologue, I think it’s during the shot of the duplicate hats in the forest, and I think it’s Bale speaking. Cheers. |
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