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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
DEATH DEFYING ACTS Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce), as we learn in Death Defying Acts, was more than a legend of derring-do, who could get out of a pair of handcuffs or chains while hanging upside down in a large container filled with water (as we see at one point), or perform any number of unbelievable-to-the-eye tricks for the masses. He also had a problem with his past, particularly the untimely death of his mother. The film’s central plot device is a contest Houdini held across the world—a payment of $10,000 would go to whoever could say what his mother’s dying words were. A whole movie about Houdini might be interesting enough, and we get slices here and there about what was possibly his upbringing in a full house with lots of siblings and no money, and his years of physically training. But writers Tony Grisoni and Brian Ward center the story around mothers and their children; in particular Mary (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Benji (Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan), a Scottish pair of con artists. Mary decides to go for the ten-grand challenge, but she gets more than she bargained for: falling in and in-between love with Mr. Houdini (call him Harry), despite the best efforts of Houdini’s personal assistant, Sugarman (Timothy Spall), to keep them away from one another—or, perhaps, just the truth. When looking at Houdini as a public figure and iconoclast, Grisoni and Ward stand on solid ground. It’s also a credit to the chameleon-like actor Pearce that he makes Houdini so alive in nearly every scene he’s in (he and Zeta-Jones, I should add, are very pleasant to look at as an on-screen couple). But in the love affair side of things—it’s mentioned once or twice that Houdini is already married—they falter in a mishmash of sentimentality, including the overbearing and maudlin narration from Ronan. To paraphrase one sound bite, “It was not [Houdini’s] body that was wrapped in chains, but his heart.” It’s not an asset, either, that
director Gillian Armstrong (Oscar and Lucinda) adds very little
by way of visual imagination. Save for some effort from a trooper
character actor like Spall, there’s not much life in the movie, and
the writers just barely edge their way out of making the same kind of
cop-out ending (i.e. “real magic”) like that of the much more superior
magician film The Prestige. It’s all a shame, more so because of
Houdini’s charms and idiosyncrasies, which leave us wanting more of him
throughout. Jack Gattanella
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