Magic Tricks
by Chris Dashiell

One of the foremost figures in the Austin, Texas, indie film scene, Kyle Henry is more interested in questioning and challenging cinematic form than in the content of dramas with their usual beginnings, middles, and ends. At first glance, Room, his first fiction film, seems to employ conventional narrative tropes, but he’s got other things on his mind.

Julia (Cyndi Williams) is a middle-aged married woman in Houston with two kids and a lot of worries. She works nights at a bingo parlor, for not enough money, is overweight, suffers from migraines, and has started smoking again. Then a bizarre new element enters her already stressful existence—she starts to have dreams and visions of a large, empty, warehouse-like room. These lead to blackouts, and eventually she crashes her car on the side of the road. Driven by an unaccountable impulse, she then steals money from the boss’s safe and flies to New York City, abandoning her husband and kids. In the city she makes increasingly desperate efforts to find the room she has seen in her visions.

Henry has wrapped his film in an intense, ambient sound design. The music draws you into Julia’s states of mind as she becomes more and more lost and crazy, but the sounds also hold a clue to the director’s intent. Snatches of news reports from TV and radio hint at violence and terrorism, and the name and image of George Bush play a cameo role as well. We get the feeling early on that the urban environment, with its constant traffic and media-sponsored noise, is menacing, drained of meaning. The sense of harried exhaustion in a world going too fast becomes even more acute when the tale shifts to New York.

Williams, a newcomer, makes the horror of having your mind slowly fall apart seem absolutely convincing, without overacting or dramatic flourish. She’s onscreen for almost the entire film, and her performance, requiring a level of vulnerability that seems agonizing, is outstanding.

Ultimately Room is about the search for solace and meaning. For Julia, every little event or object is a possible sign leading her to the room, but we can’t tell whether the signs or real or if wishing just makes them seem so. In a way, this is also Kyle Henry’s dark little joke on the audience. The grim paradoxes of the search, and their source in a restlessness of mind that seems to infect the culture at large, are the film’s focus, rather than the goal. All the usual hints that we’re getting somewhere, the kinds of things that keep us striving, lead only to more emptiness, like the forbidding room of Julia’s visions. The form of the picture, its very structure, mirrors its main character’s relentless inward descent.

The Illusionist, a movie by Neil Burger, is something of an oasis in the desert of summer blockbusters, a studio film with a healthy respect for old-fashioned cinematic virtues.

The story concerns a magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton), whose amazing illusions make him the most popular attraction in early 20th century Vienna. As a boy he had a love affair with a girl from the nobility, but they were separated. As an adult, she has become a beautiful Countess, (Jessica Biel), and it looks as if she will marry Austria’s Crown Prince, an arrogant villain played by Rufus Sewel. Eisenheim decides to renew his affair with the Countess, who still loves him, but the Prince’s ambitious chief inspector (Paul Giamatti), is determined to stop him.

Part of the film’s charm is that it indulges freely in illusions just like its hero, and here we may discern the tone of wry fantasy that characterizes the work of novelist Steven Millhauser, who wrote the story which Burger has adapted for the screen. The gothic plot, involving desperate lovers and palace intrigue, doesn’t try to be more than the kind of tale one could imagine telling to a group of friends before a campfire. We are carried along because the film never strains too hard for effect, never winks at the audience. This is straight period mystery and romance, done with understated wit and verve. In addition, the cinematography (Dick Pope) is a marvel—the images have a burnished, slightly faded quality like old photographs. And the musical score by Philip Glass proves that the composer can excel within the confines of melodrama.

This is not a character study, but a smoothly plotted little fantasy, and one is well advised not to look for realism. I’m sorry to say, in addition, that Edward Norton doesn’t have quite enough charisma for the title role. He is called on to seem mysterious and enigmatic throughout the picture, when his talent lies more with expressive characters, I should think. In any case, Paul Giamatti, although he’s second billed, has the more important role as the chief inspector. It is he who must figure out the clues left by the illusionist, and in doing so change his perspective. Giamatti brings a surprisingly adept old-world charm to the part. Jessica Biel is lovely, but she also—to my surprise—acquits herself quite well as a different type of character from her sex-bomb image.