Edward Norton and Jessica Biel: Will his tricks win the princess's heart?

Is Eisenheim just a crafty magician, or does he really have supernatural powers to conjure the Ungrateful Dead?

You be the judge in Neil Burger's elegant adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Millhauser's story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," a romantic period-piece mystery starring Edward Norton as a master prestidigitator and Jessica Biel as his lost-and-found aristocratic lover.

		'The Illusionist' Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality and violence. Starring: Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, Paul Giamatti. Director: Neil Burger. Web site: www.theillusionist.com/

Separated by class and torn apart in their rural childhood, they meet again 15 years later in turn-of-the-century Vienna, the imperial capital, where he has become a stage sensation and she has become Princess Sophie von Teschen, engaged to sinister Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) -- which makes her queen-to-be of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Eisenheim will be using his powers to win her back and (unwittingly) undermine the royal house. Leopold will be using his to make Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) do the dirty work of spying on Eisenheim, exposing him as a fraud and removing a grave threat to his power and his fiancee.

Giamatti also serves as narrator for this battle of wits between himself and the enigmatic illusionist -- a Hapsburg Houdini with a touch of Penn and Teller. Despite his harassment and demotion from royal-parlor to seedy working-class venues, Eisenheim gains access to Sophie and gains a growing cult who believe he's more than a performer.

Norton in the title role is disarmingly low-key, eschewing histrionics and doggedly committed to his role, as ever (his Oscar nominations for "Primal Fear" and "American History X" were well deserved) uncharismatic but sympathetic. Biel and her full-lipped beauty are equally full of restraint. Giamatti -- a dead ringer for Ulysses S. Grant, with his cigar -- makes his curiously ambivalent character convincing.

Director Burger, whose sole previous feature was the critically acclaimed "Interview With the Assassin" (2002), uses circle wipes and similar vintage devices to render the atmospheric time and place. In that, he's facilitated by the Philip Glass soundtrack and the gorgeous Czech location settings captured by cinematographer Dick Pope. My favorite is a Dick Cheney-reminiscent scene shot in the Archduke Ferdinand's actual hunting lodge, obscenely adorned floor-to-ceiling with the trophy heads of stocked animals "harvested" during his hunts.

In addition to fine performances, "The Illusionist" boasts period-accurate "real" magic tricks performed live, without the aid of 21st-century special F/X. An orange tree blossoming out of a seed is quite lovely, and butterflies returning a handkerchief to its owner in the audience is even lovelier. But overall, the film's magic itself is not terribly astounding and might have benefited from a little helping sleight-of-hand.

Minor point. Whether or not you buy (or anticipate) Eisenheim's final trick-piece de resistance, this is at least a good, if not a grand, illusion.