The Machinist

Okay, before we go any further, I'll get one observation out of the way. Christian Bale's massive weight loss to play the protagonist in this film is both revolting and remarkable. He looks nothing like his former self, as you can see from the image below. It's probably the most impressive body sculpting in movie actor history (and I include both De Niro's weight gain at the end of Raging Bull and Hanks' transformation for the mid-section of Cast Away). Bale dropped 65 pounds for this movie, and it's pretty much as disgusting as it sounds. He looks like a syphilitic Olsen twin fresh out of Dachau. That's thin, okay?

Alright, now with that out of the way, I can tell you why this movie isn't any good.




Brad Anderson's The Machinist is a well-made thriller with a winning lead performance from an obviously devoted actor. It's also a movie with no reason to exist. Its visual style, though professional, feels copped from other, better movies. Its actual entertainment value is negligable. And the screenplay revolves around The #1 Most Overused Screenwriting Convention of the Decade. I don't want to blow it for you if you haven't seen many movies or movie trailers lately, but I will say this: If you have seen Secret Window, Identity, Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind or have read the book Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, you know this twist already. This twist is retardedly overused. No more movies should be made with this twist.

But on to the story, which I will try to summarize without giving away the ludicrously obvious twist. Bale plays Trevor Reznik, not to be confused with the guy from NIN, who weighs a good 4 or 5 pounds more. He works a dull job at a machine shop, operating a lathe, and spends his free time eating pie in an airport coffee shop and fucking comely prostitute Jennifer Jason Leigh. And he hasn't slept a wink in about a year.

Soon enough, odd things begin to happen to Reznik. He meets a creepy fellow machinist named Ivan (John Sharian), with toes where his fingers should be, who begins following him for some reason. He accidentally causes a horrible accident at the plant. Strange notes begin appearing on his refrigerator. And there's an awful smell coming from somewhere in the kitchen. Is his lack of sleep causing him to simply crack up? Or is there some deeper meaning behind all of the madness?

The film goes on like this for a while without even bothering to build intensity, and it begins to feel rather pointless. Just look at that picture: The guy's obviously losing his mind, so we're fairly aware from early on that there's no reason to trust his perspective on reality. Any savvy moviegoer should really be able to tell what's going on from about an hour into the movie forward. The film would be effective as a horror film, I think, if anything horrifying ever happened, but it doesn't, so it becomes a fairly rote, if darkly stylish, indie thriller.

Strangely, it's not the first film Anderson's directed to unfold in this manner. His Session 9 started with a promising horror movie premise (an asbestos removal team is locked up for a weekend in an abandoned insane asylum) and then proceeded towards a predictable, silly conclusion. His Happy Accidents starts off as a passable romantic comedy (with the added bonus of a leading role for Vincent D'Onofrio) before veering into bizarre science-fiction territory. I wish he'd either find a script with a twist ending worth building to, or abandon the idea of jerking the audience around altogether and simply make a straight-forward piece of entertainment.

The Machinist has some ingenuity in its final moments. The actual "reveal" and the few scenes that follow are better than in this year's Secret Window, which so thoroughly botched a similar twist as to make this film look accomplished in comparison. I'm sure Anderson and his screenwriter Scott Kosar thought they had an original-enough take on the material to warrant the production of the film, and someone in Park City thought it significant enough for Sundance. I suspect mass audiences will probably feel as I did: that we've been down this road before.