Death Defying Acts

Death Defying Acts ended up not really fitting into the blog’s gestalt at all, but I thought it would when I sat down to watch it. It seemed to be in the general vein of The Illusionist or The Prestige, two movies I very much enjoyed, and Houdini is always an interesting historical figure to include in a narrative. Plus, with Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the casting had promise. (Saoirse Ronan and Timothy Spall, it turned out, were in it as well.)

Where to begin with this movie? To start with the positive, I suppose, the art direction was superb, and the cinematography was pleasant (if not quite spectacular). Pearce does a lot of acting, much of it very interesting, and the other three gamely give it their best.

The fundamental problem is the screenplay.  It begins pleasant, but cliché: a plucky young Scottish girl (Ronan) and her mother (Zeta-Jones) are down-and-out entertainers, posing as psychics in low-budget vaudeville style shows. As an aside, asking an audience to ever believe Zeta-Jones is “down-and-out” is a bit of a stretch, though she does well enough with the accent that “Scottish” isn’t laughable. When Harry Houdini comes to town, Zeta-Jones’ character angles to get the money he offers for proof of genuine supernatural contact with the dead.

So far, so predictable. Ronan is aggressively adorable, Pearce and Zeta-Jones make eyes at one another, and Spall is Houdini’s disapproving manager/agent/assistant… it doesn’t really matter. Pearce sells Houdini as a consummate performer, haunted by his own private demons, and in a different movie could have been quite interesting. Up until this point, very average. There’s not much chemistry in the romance, and things seem to be moving in a very foreseeable direction.

Suddenly, though, almost out of the blue, it’s revealed that Zeta-Jones looks very much like Houdini’s (dead) mother did when she was young. The same dead mother he’s trying to contact. The same dead mother WHOSE WEDDING DRESS HE KEEPS IN A LOCKED TRUNK, creepy.

The same dead mother whose wedding dress he makes Zeta-Jones wear at a public séance. For science! But just when you think he’s about to go all Norman Bates on us, Ronan – whose awkward voice-overs don’t do the movie any favors – has an actual psychic experience, all Little Boy in Ragtime style, throwing the séance into chaos and, presumably, throwing us firmly into an alternate reality, as this would have made some headlines.

That’s fine. It’s historical fiction, and at this point, the creepy movie with a fantastical element was much more interesting than anything that preceeded it. By taking a turn for the macabre and the bizarre, I had hopes that Death Defying Acts would redeem itself. (It even has a near-silent but Hamlet-esque moment where Houdini contemplates suicide following the revelation that he wasn’t there when his mother died.)

But then the story fumbles in the final 15 minutes. Houdini comes to their little hut (in the graveyard), and we endure 10 minutes of terrible dialogue, 2 minutes of unsexy, PG-13 fumbling, and Zeta-Jones’ beautiful tears as Houdini drives off into the sunset. Ronan goes on about losing her psychic ability as she grew up, as Houdini is sucker-punched to death, and it’s all a bit of a trainwreck.

My friend and I theorized that, of the two screenwriters listed on the credits, one wrote the original, bad script, and one tried to fix it, but only really succeeded with a few scenes in and around the séance. We can’t know, of course. But the acting, the costumes, and the general design couldn’t save this from becoming a hot mess, in which a terrible ending dragged down even the likable parts of the beginning.

The real shame of it is that some of the elements of this could have been an excellent movie.  But wasting A talent on D material does no one any favors.

Grade: C- Despite Pearce’s good work and lovely visuals, the storytelling is deeply flawed.