Christian Bale delivers harrowing performance in creepy nightmare
A couple of times early on in "The Machinist," Trevor Reznik, the film's ghost-like protagonist, is told "If you were any thinner, you wouldn't exist."
It is an interesting statement; by rights, in today's extremely thin marketplace, a film like "The Machinist" shouldn't exist either. There is no real context for a film like this to breathe in anymore. In today's market, where every film is expected to fit into a commercially-minded matrix dominated by the local beehive cineplex, most audiences and reviewers might see "The Machinist" as a baffling failure. Its ideas aren't "big" enough, the plot progression doesn't follow the formula, etc.
Christian Bale lost 60 pounds to play the title role in 'The Machinist,' a haunted Kafkaesque nightmare.
For me, however, watching the film took me back to the cinematic weirdness-seeking days of my youth, where a trip to some backwater dying indie-theater, struggling to keep the doors open another week in face of the onslaught of cineplex sameness, would yield up some mondo-bizarro bit of wonderfulness that you just knew was going to stay in your head forever. You'd leave the theater thinking "Well — THAT — was different," and in the following weeks you'd replace the experience of it with some new experience, or three or four and you might even think you've forgotten it, but all the while it's skittering around in dark whorls of your consciousness, only to pop out and say boo every now and again, like an old but creepy friend.
It is in this context that I review "The Machinist," not as a product designed to fit into the matrix, but as a throwback to the days when films had more latitude to exist as nothing more than a good old-fashioned creepfest if they should so choose. The matrix has no room anymore for weird little gems, and I think films in general suffer for it.
Christian Bale plays the title role at great personal sacrifice. It is claimed he lost more than sixty pounds to play the part, and it shows. Gaunt, thin, wasted, don't really describe it. Bale is positively skeletal in the film — alarmingly so. As other characters say of him, he really does seem on the verge of poofing out of existence. Perhaps he actually doesn't exist; he is so much a shadow of a human that even as you look at him, it seems there is no definitive proof that he is actually there.
The cause of his condition is a mystery. Trevor's maze-like apartment is full of clues and hints: his walls are covered with post-it notes, most of which he has scrawled himself in jittery pencil strokes, but where do the others come from, those in crisply printed block lettering? Too, Trevor seems possessed by strange compulsions and ritualistic behavior; but he can't make sense of any of it. As he tells Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in another one of the roles she seems to take based solely on the emotional pain it will cause her), the prostitute who is one of his few human contacts, the only thing he knows for sure is that he hasn't been able to sleep in a year, which is also about the time when he basically stopped eating.
"Jesus Christ!" Stevie says upon hearing the news. Trevor offers a weak smile. "I've tried him too."
Although the film has some fun with the mystery of Trevor's condition, neither is the solution too deeply hidden. Director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Scott Kosar provide plenty of visual clues and motifs for puzzle solvers (and in one instance there is a fairly obvious giveaway), but, ultimately Anderson and Kosar seem less interested in the mystery and more intrigued by documenting the waking nightmare that Trevor's life has become.
A year without sleep makes Trevor the ultimate unreliable narrator; how can he — and, therefore, we — trust anything we see and hear? Nor is he entirely a sympathetic character; there were many places I found myself losing patience with Trevor: "EAT SOMETHING! Quit being so weird!" It is only at the end that I could see how his actions throughout the film made perfect sense.
Cinematographers Charlie Jiminez and Xavi Gimenez have put their color palette on a radical diet to equal Bale's. The colors in Trevor's world are a limited buffet of sickly blues and greens, as if he lives in the ocean 60-feet down. But occasionally bright colors, mostly reds, intrude into his world and Trevor reacts to them, so it seems obvious that the palette choices are not just a trick by the cinematographers, but are actually the way that Trevor views the world. Perhaps he is trying to reduce the world to black and white.
The mood is enhanced by Roque Banos' somber, almost retro, music score, which harkens back to Bernard Herrmann's later horror scores ("It's Alive," "Sisters") or Pino Donaggio's work in various Brian De Palma films; the music, more than perhaps anything else, is what took me back to those backwater theater trips of yore.
Considering that his every thought on the set must have been about surviving until the wrap party, Bale does a remarkable job of bringing a broad range of nuance to Reznik. He suffers magnificently, not only through the obvious physical endurance test of literally starving to death for the role, but he also convincingly conveys Trevor's unexpressed primal shriek of horror at his life, as well as his growing paranoia and despair.
The film does seem to go on a bit too long at times. There were moments in the movie where I was in fear that Anderson and Kozar might be trying to move their film out of its perfectly respectable psychotronic niche in an attempt to move it into something that might more easily fill another spot in the matrix. In a couple of places I found myself thinking how disappointed I'd be if they actually followed a few of the introduced theories: "Please, dear God, do not take us there!" I thought.
For the fact that they didn't, that they stuck to their guns and refused numerous cop-out opportunities, I am very thankful. "The Machinist" — like so many of the films I saw in those golden days of long ago — well, I don't know if it is necessarily what you'd call a "great" film, but I do think that it could be skittering around in my brain for sometime, and if it should ever in the future pop out and say boo, I think I will greet it as an old but creepy friend.