Paramount Home Video VHS & DVD
1 hr 42 mins
Director: Brad Anderson
The perfect film to chase away the summer heat is the existential chilliness of director Brad Anderson’s “The Machinist,” whose very Catholic dealings with guilt and redemption are filtered through a ’50s noir smorgasbord of Theremin-styled music and late night wanderings through the plaque-colored streets of Los Angeles. Throw in a performance by Christian Bale, whose cadaver-like presence transcends its gimmick, and a much underrated performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is now a pro at playing prostitutes and loose women and whose approach always seems natural and never empty. All of this adds up to a film that treats its hero’s suffering as not only intimately cosmic but ultimately moving and pained enough that should make the king of such angst, director Ingmar Bergman, chuckle at faith’s role in this film as a bullying referee for the soul.
We first meet Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) on the beach in a classic film noir fashion, rolling something wrapped in a carpet down a boat ramp into the ocean. It is in his flashback that precedes this event that we meet his predicament head on – Trevor has not slept soundly in a year and it is starting to show. In fact, it is at first disgusting to witness the deterioration of his body, which resembles a starvation victim or a mummified speed freak. Bale’s lean muscles and gray skin only seem to paint his bones, and his cadaver-like face can barely contain his anguish. “If you were any thinner you’d disappear,” yells Stevie (Leigh) from the other room after a lovemaking session. Maybe that is what Trevor wants.
“The Machinist” is essentially the mystery of a protagonist whose narrative we cannot trust. Trevor works as a machinist by day and cruises the city at night, hanging out at his favorite diner in the airport and chatting to the pretty midnight shift waitress Marie (Aitana Sachez-Gijon) whose intrigue with Trevor is a mystery to him and the audience. He also has Stevie, whose tricks include a dose of warmth that transcends, through Leigh’s holistic approach to her roles, the hooker with a heart of gold cliché.
It is the ghostly new shop employee named Ivan (John Sharian) that brings Trevor to the head of his crisis. An accident happens to a fellow co-worker that implicates Trevor, and his co-workers begin to distrust his judgments. Mysterious Post-It’s begin to appear on Trevor’s apartment refrigerator that play a strange game of hangman, and the monolithic structure that Trevor must pass to and from work every day seems to increasingly hypnotize his already exhausted gaze.
“The Machinist” does have its faults, the foremost being an embarrassing sense of symbolism passing as cosmetic profundity. Screenwriter Scott Kosar tries to play a homage to the noir genre, whose limitations are always cursed by its own cleverness, and what we end up with is a very moving finale, but without a sense of playfulness. I enjoyed “The Machinist” because of its mock-somber tone, but at its end I felt the weightlessness of its effect.
–Joe Ramirez
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