The Machinist

Reviewed by Paul Byrnes
June 9, 2005
Tortured soul ... Christian Bale lost a huge amount of weight for
the role of the creepy-looking factory worker Trevor Reznick.

Tortured soul ... Christian Bale lost a huge amount of weight for the role of the creepy-looking factory worker Trevor Reznick.


Directed by Brad Anderson
Written by Scott Kosar
Rated M
Cinemas everywhere

A young man rolls a body in a carpet, drives to the sea and struggles to the edge of the water. It is very dark, but someone sees him. Desperately, he kicks the roll of carpet down a cement slab, as a voice asks: "Who are you?"

The young man turns towards the torch. He is a ghastly sight, more creature than man. There is blood on his hollow cheek, beneath a black eye. His bones protrude like a concentration camp survivor. His face is a mixture of fear and malice.

That's the first scene of The Machinist and it's a knee-knocker. We don't know whom he has killed or why, but we know this man has been through a lot. His name is Trevor Reznick. He is a machinist in a factory full of dark, metal-crunching machines, and he hasn't slept in a year.

Christian Bale apparently lost 28.5 kilograms to play this wraith, and the effect is shocking. He looks awful. The cinematography, bathed in a greasy grey light, makes him look worse. Stripped before his bathroom mirror, scrubbing his hands with bleach, he's like a naked Nosferatu. Everything about him is creepy, but we can see that he is tormented. He is reading Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, but he looks more like the killer student from Crime and Punishment.

Trevor holds on to human contact with only a few people. Most nights, after his shift, he visits a cafe in an airport lounge, where a beautiful waitress (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) is kind to him. Some nights he goes to a hooker, Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He's a regular and they're friends. At different times, both women tell him the same thing: "If you were any thinner, you wouldn't exist."

The Machinist is a psychological thriller and a good one, if you don't mind being pushed around. All thrillers do this, playing games, withholding clues, laying false tracks, but some do it so well that you go willingly. The surprises pay the bill for the manipulation. If they don't, you feel short-changed. The worst thing you can say about a film that sets up a puzzle is, "I saw that coming".

Some people will pick up the clues early in The Machinist and some won't. I got some, not all, but I remained unengaged throughout, largely because of the film's deliberateness, which feels like lack of passion. This seems a strange thing to say, given Bale's obvious commitment to the role.

His performance is the best thing about the movie. His emaciation is uncomfortably real, something an actor can't fake, but it's the only thing in the movie that does feel real. The rest is all movie technique, the director showing off his tricks, especially his devotion to Hitchcock, even down to the use of a theremin on the soundtrack. Did he want the score to sound cheesy, I wonder, or was it just enthusiasm?

The sense of fractured reality is to some extent deliberate, an attempt to enter Trevor's fevered brain, but that's not what bothered me. I could feel his terrible pain. The trouble is, I could feel none of the director's - just his hands, gleefully pulling all the strings. Hitchcock is manipulative too, but his playfulness usually conceals a deep connection to the story he's telling.

In The Machinist, Trevor's malnourishment seems ultimately like a parlour trick, a cover for the filmmaker's lack of emotion. Bale went to extreme lengths for this movie, but the film never quite matches his commitment.
