Scardino: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone makes a refreshing break from the gravitas of Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi's recent roles. As Vegas magicians Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton, they put in two of their most plastic performances in years - there's as much singing and dancing as acting here, while the film's driven by set pieces as much as by scenes. On top of that, Jim Carrey completes the trio, as Steve Gray, an up-and-coming street magician who threatens to draw crowds away from Wonderstone and Marvelton's act. What makes the film so striking is that Gray isn't a magician in any conventional sense - although he does perform the occasional trick, most of his routines involve acts of terrifying endurance, drawn from the extreme stuntwork popularised by Jackass. While Wonderstone and Marvelton have built an entire spectacular infrastructure around themselves - they don't just have their own show, they have their own theatre – Gray’s magic stems from an earlier exploitative matrix, as if to suggest that people seek out Jackass in the same way that they might have sought out an older kind of magic. That’s not to say that Gray’s old-fashioned – if anything, he’s more cutting-edge than Wonderstone and Marvelton, framing endurance in terms of a corporate attention economy that’s turned the very act of focusing, or concentrating, into a kind of magic. Not only does one of his most gruesome routines involve going for several days without blinking, but he actually one-ups Tony Robbins’ corporate magic – he doesn’t just walk on hot coals, he spends a whole night sleeping on them. It feels right, then, that Wonderstone and Marvelton respond with a supposedly unperformable trick - "the Disappearing Audience" - that pushes each member of the audience to their absolute limits of endurance and attentiveness, but without any of them being aware of it. Without revealing exactly how it works, it ends up reminding us that dexterity - real dexterity, the dexterity that Wonderstone and Marvelton have to learn anew - is still the most refined form of endurance. And, much like The Office, which it often recalls, the film is an elegant tribute to dexterous endurance, the enormous, invisible pressure placed on a pair of fingers to make a card trick just right.