The film “Illusionist” Is an Academy Award-nominated 2006 period drama written and directed by Neil Burger and starring Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, and Paul Giamatti. Neil Burger wrote a script adapted for stage from a Steven Millhauser’s “Eisenheim the Illusionist”, which was primarily printed in Esquire in 1989. “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is based on the story by Steven Millhauser, the film shows the story of life and love of a talented and mysterious magician Eisenheim in the beginning of the 20th century in Venna. “The Illusionist”, a film about allusions and life, vanquishes the main obstruction in films about the matter of stage magicians. Magic tricks are the weak point of visual effects. By means of the cinema illusions are extremely easy to be made and, consequently, even easier to disbelieve.
In the beginning of the 20th century there was given some additional information on what Millhauser depicted as the era of levitating and beheading, of spectral visions and unexpected disappearances, as if the disintegrating Empire were unmasking via its wizards its veiled crave for extermination (Phillips 1).” While the short story is represented as a biography, the film is structured largely as a flashback. It begins with Uhl arresting Eisenheim for vaguely defined “threats against the Empire”, while in the story “Herr Uhl was accusing Eisenheim of shaking the foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in consequence, of doing something far worse: subverting the Empire. For where would the empire be, once the idea of boundaries became blurred and uncertain?” (Millhauser 226) Lately his illusions have taken an ominous, miraculous direction. He is either an impressive deceiver or deals with black magic. With Uhl telling, “The Illusionist” jumps back for a primer on Eisenheim’s shady details. An early skirmish with a traveling wizard gives him a lesson of the wonder of producing fabulous convictions from usual methods. Some years later all people in Vienna are making a fuss of Eisenheim’s magic. The prince and his lover, Sophie, attend one of the performances that Eisenheim acts out. This meeting is not the first between Sophie and Eisenheim: in their childhood they were sweethearts brought apart by class and circumstantial diverse. The prince, an immoral high-flier on the edge of a beneficial from the political point of view marriage to Sophie, gets a needless competotor in Eisenheim.Steven Millhauser’s lustrous self-reflexive stories contain puzzles, enigmas, and insidious allusions to the interaction between life and literature. The story is written in the form of biography (Lambert 99). Under the suggested diminution of honest deformation, whereby there exists a synchronous approval, absolute rejection of Eisenheim is irregular at the end of the short story, for it does not definitely harmonize with the both-and spirit of lists (Saltzman 60).
In spite of the fabulous incidents of the plot, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is introduced in the manner of disinterested nonfiction, as a biography of an enigmatic character. Not much is known of the magician Eisenheim’s background, other than that he is the creature of the Empire of Austria-Hungary, and its craving for stage witchery. Son of a cabinetmaker, Eisenheim uses his skill construct the devices that help him to achieve his earliest apparitions. His craving for magical things can be followed to a meeting with a magician being on the wing (Laskowski 1). “Eisenheim the Illusionist” represents the audience as an oblivious but firm defender of opposition and probability beyond the outstanding stories of the country and its history. The two versions of the story, printed edition and the film represent the protagonist as a threat to the Empire, government, and existing social order.
Works Cited
Lambert, N. Joshua. American Jewish Fiction. JPS Guides. Jewish Publication Society, 2009.
Laskowski, William. “Eisenheim the Illusionist.” Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2004. eNotes.com. Web.
Millhauser, Steven. “Eisenheim the Illusionist”. Esquire (1989): 214-229.
Phillips, Michael. “Movie review: ‘The Illusionist’. Tribune movie critic”. 2007. Metromix Chicago. Web.
Saltzman, Michael Arthur. This mad “instead”: governing metaphors in contemporary American fiction. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2000.