Cinemagic

...Duchess Von Shtiel...

...Though it's based on a short story by the contemporary fabulist Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist also owes an obvious debt to a lavish and preposterous 1949 MGM movie called Black Magic, in which Orson Welles plays a magician and mesmerist who helps bring about the French Revolution...

...admonishes the nanny in a ludicrous Austrian accent...

...This is a testament to the much-abused middle-aged moviegoer, the only force that is standing between us and the complete surrender of the multiplex to children: toddlers, tweens, teens, and those unfortunate adults whose cultural appetites have not progressed since childhood...

...Mostly, though, Burger has to rely on his cast to make the journey backward a convincing one—and to a remarkable degree, the actors of The Illusionist succeed in banishing all traces of modernity...

...Only a single curse word, one discreet sex scene, and some very John Podhoretz, a columnist for the NewYork Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...

...Leopold is a fictional character, though he retains traces of the manic madness that afflicted Franz Josef's actual son Rudolf, who died in history's most famous murder-suicide at an imperial hunting lodge in Mayerling...

...The Illusionist was basically dumped into theaters in the dog days of August with very little advance publicity or advertising...

...Edward Norton essays the title character, a Jewish cabinetmaker's son who leaves home to travel the world and then appears out of nowhere in Vienna at the age of 30 as the world's greatest magician...

...But he does his best work yet in The Illusionist, playing an unabashedly romantic hero—quiet-ly good-humored, unreservedly passionate, and unafraid to stand up to unjust power...

...Yes, Master, I am the Queen of France," says a blonde with a Veronica Lake peekaboo bang hypnotized by Welles in one of the great Wheldon moments in all of cinema...

...Cinemagic Turn-of-the-century Vienna might have looked like 'The Illusionist.' by John Podhoretz Huw Wheldon, who ran the BBC during its glory days in the 1960s and early '70s, and was one of the world's great wits to boot, once made glorious fUn of Hollywood's historical epics: You either had some Midwestern galoot uneasily stuffed into an 18th-century outfit mumbling "Cardinal Richeloo will not be pleased to hear of this," or you had a maid curtsying and telling her employer, "Excuse me, ma'am, but there's a chap at the back door who says his name is Beethoven...

...His most original acting choice is the accent he gives Eisenheim: There's very little Teutonic tenor to it, but he sounds entirely foreign nonetheless, and entirely a figure of the past...

...He is played by the English actor Rufus Sewell, who is similarly impeccable—imposing and unpredictable, intellectually arrogant and short-tempered...

...You mustn't play here...

...Miraculously, though, these are the only moments in The Illusionist that fall under the Wheldon rule, even though it is a stunningly old-fashioned piece of work that almost seems like it was buried in a time capsule on the MGM lot in 1947 and rediscovered a few months ago...

...modest special effects suggest its present-day origins...

...A little boy and a little girl are playing in his house, when her nanny rushes in...

...These are peasants...

...Larry Flynt), brilliant skinheads (American History X), and delusional would-be cowboys (Down in the Valley) with meticulous precision...

...This scene follows hard upon our first glimpse of the quintessentially American actor Paul Giamatti, playing the chief of police in Vienna, storming zeh stage of a gaslit theater und announcing zeh arrest of a magician named "Eisen-heim zeh Illusionist...

...As Eisenheim the Illusionist, Norton stands ramrod straight and yet manages at the same time to convey a sense of great relaxation, as if he truly is in on the secrets of the universe...

...If the name Edward Norton does not quite conjure up a face, that's because he is one of the screen's foremost chameleons, inhabiting schizophrenic southerners (Primal Fear), hotshot Jewish lawyers (The People vs...

...Writer-director Neil Burger did not have the financial resources to recreate Vienna in 1900, so he has, instead, chosen to transport us into the past through quick, lush, and supremely self-confident shots of cobblestoned streets, horse-drawn carriages and 19th-century buildings (with Prague standing in for Vienna)—not to mention an overwhelming abundance of male facial hair, wittily designed by makeup artist Julie Pearce...

...Burger and his photographer Dick Pope have modeled the look and feel of the movie on an early photographic process called "autochrome," and every frame looks like an ancient photograph lovingly preserved and restored...

...Giamatti, whose accent seems slightly jarring at first, proves almost flawless as the middle-aged son of a provincial butcher who has risen to a position of prominence at the right hand of Crown Prince Leopold, son of the Emperor Franz Josef...

...Miraculously, it has managed to find an audience, and there are suggestions that it may become the year's second out-of-nowhere sleeper hit (after Little Miss Sunshine...

...There's a worrisome hint of this inadvertent anachronistic comedy in the opening sequences of The Illusionist, a splendid new movie set in what used to be called fin-de-siecle Vienna...