The implacability of a machine-tooled rabbit.
Saw The Machinist this past Friday (3 December) at a midnight screening; this is a production of the Spanish subsidiary of the French television network Canal +, directed by Brad Anderson (who has directed episodes of various TV shows such as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire and The Shield, as well as the movies Next Stop Wonderland and Session 9) and written by Scott Kosar (whose sole previous screenwriting credit was the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), with a mostly American cast.
The Machinist is rarity: a suspense thriller that actually delivers on the suspense and chills. Anderson and Kosar seem to be channeling various influences that all too often trip up filmmakers who aren't careful to limit how much homage they pay them. (Brian DePalma's oeuvre can make one absolutely despair of ever enjoying another Hitchcock movie, for example.) There's a goodly smattering of David Lynch, particularly the creepy industrial sets of Eraserhead and a partly-repaired hand that is both alarming and revolting; there's a more generous helping of Hitchcock, since the main character, Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), is a total wreck of a man who has no idea who he is or why he's so utterly isolated, and is by turns baffled and tormented by various clues in the form of cryptic Post-It Notes, a mysterious stranger named Ivan (John Sharian), and the two women (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), apparently mirror images of each other, who drift in and out of his life to increasingly ominous effect. There are nods to Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Alan Parker's Angel Heart and David Fincher's Fight Club; for all I know, props are given to Christopher Nolan's Memento too. But the movie that The Machinist most strongly recalls, finally, is Vincent Gallo's egotistical exercise The Brown Bunny; one hopes that Mr. Gallo will take good notes when he watches The Machinist so that he can learn how to make a movie of crushing sadness and alienation that (some!) people will actually want to watch instead of merely fast-forward to a gratuitous, explicit sex act.
The Machinist is also an understated though powerful reminder to Hollywood that one need not spend several million dollars on whiz-bang CGI special effects to make an involving thriller, and that, in the final analysis, the very best special effects of all are people. Actors. In this case, Christian Bale.
There's a fair amount of anticipatory chatter in the fanboy community over the casting of Christian Bale as a Bruce Wayne/Batman in the forthcoming "Batman Year One" movie, Batman Begins; naturally, anyone who has any interest in the character whatsoever is nervously wondering if Bale is up to the job. After seeing him in The Machinist, I'd have to say that Bale has the potential of being the best Batman thus far; he certainly has a few kinds of intense down pat, and if nothing else, these days the fan community at large wants its Batman intense.
Bale can play relatively normal guys who experience relatively normal bursts of intensity (Velvet Goldmine, Reign of Fire), or he can play smoldering-though-vacuous predators (American Psycho), or tortured castaways upon a sea of humanity, as here. At first you're willing to give Bale's character the benefit of the doubt after the opening (and penultimate) scene; but when Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michael Ironside show up, it's a safe bet that they're not there as partners for good mental health.
Even if you haven't seen any of the movies that Christian Bale has been in as an adult (Empire of the Sun and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V don't really count, obviously), even if you didn't see how goddamned ripped he was in American Psycho, you're likely to gasp, or at least wince, when you first see him without his shirt in The Machinist: he lost sixty pounds for the role, and he makes Adrien Brody at the end of The Pianist look like he just got back from a health spa. Bale's ribs and vertebrae can be individually counted, and his face is essentially a skull with a thin draping of skin over it; all the more fitting, then, that his movements, as the movie progresses, recall those of Richard Backus playing the ultimate zombie in the Bob Clark/Alan Ormsby chiller Deathdream (a.k.a. Nightwalk, Dead of Night, The Night Andy Came Home, etc.). As he writes himself Post-It Notes documenting his slow, inexorable weight loss, one may well flash to the Stephen King novel (originally published under the nom de plume of Richard Bachman) Thinner, and regret that Bale wasn't cast as the lead in the movie version. I found myself appreciating Bale's performance on two levels: superficially, as part of a well-made movie; and as an ill-advised, if not crazed, effort by an actor to suffer for his art, potentially as life-threatening as the wild stunts done by the likes of Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, or climbing into a 150 pound rubber-and-latex suit to play various daikaiju in front of banks of klieg lights in Godzilla and Gamera movies.
Bale's Trevor Reznik works the graveyard shift at a machine shop and has no social life outside of a prostitute named Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a waitress at an airport diner (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón); he's plagued by insomnia (he tells Stevie that he hasn't slept in a year, and he's so wasted-looking that we have no trouble believing him), unstoppable weight loss and periodic discoveries of Post-It Notes in his apartment that he didn't write. His life becomes increasingly unstable when he meets a chatty, grinning hard case named Ivan (John Sharian; speaking of special effects, I hope that Mr. Sharian was wearing prosthetic teeth, 'cause if he wasn't, then he's got the scariest-looking choppers I've ever seen, including those sported by Richard Kiel in two James Bond movies; brrrr) and unwittingly causes a horrific accident at the shop where he works. (I'm pretty intimidated by machine shops anyway, but the shop here had me squirming in dread; those mills, presses, lathes and whatnot are hungry, boy!)
Ultimately, as in any movie whose basic premise is "How crazy is he?," the movie stands or falls based on the lead actor's performance; Bale nails this one right out of the ballpark, and the dénouement proves that The Machinist has a bit more heft than your average Hitchcockian (or, arguably, Lynchian) exercise.
There's a sidebar worth mentioning: normally I get annoyed at a movie that's too cute with the books the director wants the audience to "find" to telegraph where he's coming from (anyone spot the copy of Jesse L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance lying around in Apocalypse Now?), and, early on, when the camera zooms in on a hardbound copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that Bale lets crash to the floor as he nods off for a second in front of the TV, I recalled a similarly clunky use of this tome made by comic book writer J.M. de Matteis in an issue of Marvel Team-Up -- wherein a grizzled reporter working with Peter Parker (Spider-Man) whipped out a copy of The Idiot from his suitcase and declared that he "always traveled with it" -- and prepared myself for the worst. Spotting a copy of Kafka's The Castle in Bale's medicine cabinet, of all places, seemed to confirm my inwardly groaning doubt in the filmmakers; yet later on, when the haunted ride that he embarks on with his date's child proves to have a tableau named "Crime & Punishment," I was somewhat reassured.
It's a fine line between being too stiff and stilted and too wild and unbelievable when making these types of movies, which is why so many them are so awful; happily The Machinist falls well within the specs of a successfully engineered suspenser.
The Machinist is rarity: a suspense thriller that actually delivers on the suspense and chills. Anderson and Kosar seem to be channeling various influences that all too often trip up filmmakers who aren't careful to limit how much homage they pay them. (Brian DePalma's oeuvre can make one absolutely despair of ever enjoying another Hitchcock movie, for example.) There's a goodly smattering of David Lynch, particularly the creepy industrial sets of Eraserhead and a partly-repaired hand that is both alarming and revolting; there's a more generous helping of Hitchcock, since the main character, Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), is a total wreck of a man who has no idea who he is or why he's so utterly isolated, and is by turns baffled and tormented by various clues in the form of cryptic Post-It Notes, a mysterious stranger named Ivan (John Sharian), and the two women (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), apparently mirror images of each other, who drift in and out of his life to increasingly ominous effect. There are nods to Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Alan Parker's Angel Heart and David Fincher's Fight Club; for all I know, props are given to Christopher Nolan's Memento too. But the movie that The Machinist most strongly recalls, finally, is Vincent Gallo's egotistical exercise The Brown Bunny; one hopes that Mr. Gallo will take good notes when he watches The Machinist so that he can learn how to make a movie of crushing sadness and alienation that (some!) people will actually want to watch instead of merely fast-forward to a gratuitous, explicit sex act.
The Machinist is also an understated though powerful reminder to Hollywood that one need not spend several million dollars on whiz-bang CGI special effects to make an involving thriller, and that, in the final analysis, the very best special effects of all are people. Actors. In this case, Christian Bale.
There's a fair amount of anticipatory chatter in the fanboy community over the casting of Christian Bale as a Bruce Wayne/Batman in the forthcoming "Batman Year One" movie, Batman Begins; naturally, anyone who has any interest in the character whatsoever is nervously wondering if Bale is up to the job. After seeing him in The Machinist, I'd have to say that Bale has the potential of being the best Batman thus far; he certainly has a few kinds of intense down pat, and if nothing else, these days the fan community at large wants its Batman intense.
Bale can play relatively normal guys who experience relatively normal bursts of intensity (Velvet Goldmine, Reign of Fire), or he can play smoldering-though-vacuous predators (American Psycho), or tortured castaways upon a sea of humanity, as here. At first you're willing to give Bale's character the benefit of the doubt after the opening (and penultimate) scene; but when Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michael Ironside show up, it's a safe bet that they're not there as partners for good mental health.
Even if you haven't seen any of the movies that Christian Bale has been in as an adult (Empire of the Sun and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V don't really count, obviously), even if you didn't see how goddamned ripped he was in American Psycho, you're likely to gasp, or at least wince, when you first see him without his shirt in The Machinist: he lost sixty pounds for the role, and he makes Adrien Brody at the end of The Pianist look like he just got back from a health spa. Bale's ribs and vertebrae can be individually counted, and his face is essentially a skull with a thin draping of skin over it; all the more fitting, then, that his movements, as the movie progresses, recall those of Richard Backus playing the ultimate zombie in the Bob Clark/Alan Ormsby chiller Deathdream (a.k.a. Nightwalk, Dead of Night, The Night Andy Came Home, etc.). As he writes himself Post-It Notes documenting his slow, inexorable weight loss, one may well flash to the Stephen King novel (originally published under the nom de plume of Richard Bachman) Thinner, and regret that Bale wasn't cast as the lead in the movie version. I found myself appreciating Bale's performance on two levels: superficially, as part of a well-made movie; and as an ill-advised, if not crazed, effort by an actor to suffer for his art, potentially as life-threatening as the wild stunts done by the likes of Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, or climbing into a 150 pound rubber-and-latex suit to play various daikaiju in front of banks of klieg lights in Godzilla and Gamera movies.
Bale's Trevor Reznik works the graveyard shift at a machine shop and has no social life outside of a prostitute named Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a waitress at an airport diner (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón); he's plagued by insomnia (he tells Stevie that he hasn't slept in a year, and he's so wasted-looking that we have no trouble believing him), unstoppable weight loss and periodic discoveries of Post-It Notes in his apartment that he didn't write. His life becomes increasingly unstable when he meets a chatty, grinning hard case named Ivan (John Sharian; speaking of special effects, I hope that Mr. Sharian was wearing prosthetic teeth, 'cause if he wasn't, then he's got the scariest-looking choppers I've ever seen, including those sported by Richard Kiel in two James Bond movies; brrrr) and unwittingly causes a horrific accident at the shop where he works. (I'm pretty intimidated by machine shops anyway, but the shop here had me squirming in dread; those mills, presses, lathes and whatnot are hungry, boy!)
Ultimately, as in any movie whose basic premise is "How crazy is he?," the movie stands or falls based on the lead actor's performance; Bale nails this one right out of the ballpark, and the dénouement proves that The Machinist has a bit more heft than your average Hitchcockian (or, arguably, Lynchian) exercise.
There's a sidebar worth mentioning: normally I get annoyed at a movie that's too cute with the books the director wants the audience to "find" to telegraph where he's coming from (anyone spot the copy of Jesse L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance lying around in Apocalypse Now?), and, early on, when the camera zooms in on a hardbound copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that Bale lets crash to the floor as he nods off for a second in front of the TV, I recalled a similarly clunky use of this tome made by comic book writer J.M. de Matteis in an issue of Marvel Team-Up -- wherein a grizzled reporter working with Peter Parker (Spider-Man) whipped out a copy of The Idiot from his suitcase and declared that he "always traveled with it" -- and prepared myself for the worst. Spotting a copy of Kafka's The Castle in Bale's medicine cabinet, of all places, seemed to confirm my inwardly groaning doubt in the filmmakers; yet later on, when the haunted ride that he embarks on with his date's child proves to have a tableau named "Crime & Punishment," I was somewhat reassured.
It's a fine line between being too stiff and stilted and too wild and unbelievable when making these types of movies, which is why so many them are so awful; happily The Machinist falls well within the specs of a successfully engineered suspenser.