The Machinist

Programme Notes

The most remarkable feature of stylish psychological chiller The Machinist is the genuinely horrifying weight-loss endured by its leading man Christian Bale. Having bulked up for the gym-pumped role of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho a few years back, the Welsh actor has now virtually turned himself into a walking bag of bones as Trevor Reznik, a severely insomniac factory-worker whose chronic sleep deprivation leads to increasingly terrifying hallucinations. As Trevor starts to doubt his sanity, he finds himself drawn into what seems to be some kind of complicated murder-plot revolving around the sinister Ivan (John Sharian). Feeling himself sliding into an abyss of paranoia, Trevor confides his fears to sympathetic hooker Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and friendly waitress Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon). But who can be trusted? And who, if anyone, is what is they seem?

Apart from one unexpectedly larkish ghost-train sequence (which happens to be the most striking, imaginative and memorable in the whole picture) The Machinist is a somewhat dour experience, an all-too-effective journey into a severely troubled mind. It works best as a character-study of the tormented Trevor…But while the predictable final revelations may not break any new ground, Anderson nevertheless knows how to construct a suspenseful narrative. He's assembled a remarkable cast: freakish-looking unknown Sharian more than holds his own in his numerous scenes with the painfully hollowed-out Bale, while Leigh and veterans Michael Ironside and Anna Massey inject a welcome degree of classy professionalism. Backed up by a suitably Hitchcockian score by Raque Banos, cinematographer Xavi Gimenez creates a night-clammy backdrop of cobalt blues and steely greys - an ominously off-kilter world whose strangeness is partly explained by the fact that this very dark-looking US-set film was, incredibly, shot in the suburbs of sunny Barcelona.

There's an insinuating Hitchcock tone here that gets under our skin as it digs into the feverish mind of its central character. While building the tension, Anderson struggles to maintain an emotional connection, but he crafts a remarkably sure-handed little thriller.

Trevor Reznik (Bale) works long hours in a metalwork factory where any lapse of concentration can have grisly repercussions. But even when a colleague (Ironside) loses an arm, Trevor is preoccupied by strange notes appearing around his flat. He finds solace with a friendly hooker (Leigh) and a kindly airport cafe waitress (Sanchez-Gijon), but the sinister new guy at work (Sharian) makes his skin crawl. And since Trevor hasn't slept for a year, he has a lot of loose skin crawling over his gaunt form.

We have to wait until the end to find out just why Trevor hasn't been sleeping, and by then the film's mysteries are already coming into focus. This is a tricky script that digs around psychologically--Trevor is a terrifying bundle of paranoia and overreaction. And Bale conveys his haunted confusion perfectly. That he lost 4.5 stones is hardly irrelevant--his skeletal frame looks like something from a sci-fi horror film. But Bale also gives a powerfully internalised creepy performance.

Meanwhile, the film is shown in a bleak greyscale in which everything looks as if it's degenerating as much as Trevor is. Even the skies have a gloomy gothic feel that adds to the growing enigma at the film's centre. What's really going on here? Clearly, there are some massive disparities both in the story and in Trevor's brain. And as Anderson subtly references films like Memento, The Usual Suspects and Fight Club, it begins to become playfully engaging on a completely new level.

Along the way there are some almost unbearably harrowing sequences, including the metal-shop accidents, an insanely gruesome funfair ride and several creepy car chases. When we finally find out the truth, everything slots in so neatly that we're almost disappointed to discover the answers. But beneath the chills, Anderson is speaking beautifully about guilt, redemption and justice ... in a hoarse whisper.

The Machinist is a smart movie about a man who's cracking up. What differentiates it from other movies about mental illness is that it doesn't concern a man who was bound to go crazy all along. He is not Norman Bates. Instead, he's a fellow in the midst of an acute crisis, stemming from causes unknown, and something in Bale's performance makes this all quite clear. He lends Trevor a blithe manner and a sense of humour that suggests a fully socialized adult who just happens to be in a bad way. He can't sleep -- not at all, not for a year -- and he's obviously not eating. He's becoming paranoid and delusional. All the while, Trevor tries to regain control, writing himself notes and posting them on the refrigerator. But reality is slipping farther and farther away.

The mental illness is conveyed by director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Scott Kosar as a kind of bifurcation of reality. Trevor can function in the real world, but at any moment the abyss can reach out and claim him. On a date with a waitress friend (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), he talks in her living room. He gets up to walk down a corridor, and without the distraction of this friendly woman to keep his mind occupied, the thought of walking down a corridor suddenly feels threatening to him. He knows that if he's alone with his own mind, his mind will attack him.

As the downtrodden, sexy, trusting and quietly funny prostitute, Leigh is, of course, in her element. Sanchez-Gijon, a Spanish actress best known in America for her starring role in A Walk in the Clouds, provides a much-needed touch of sweetness -- for Trevor and for the movie. But mainly this is all Bale's show. He is strangely sympathetic, taking us right into Trevor's pain without any special pleading. To watch him is to feel it. It's also to want to buy him a double-whopper with cheese, fries and a chocolate shake.

…You need to know that it is indeed Christian Bale. He is so gaunt, his face so hollow, he looks nothing like the actor we're familiar with. There are moments when his appearance even distracts from his performance, because we worry about him. Certainly we believe that the character, Trevor, is at the end of his rope, and I was reminded of Anthony Perkins' work in Orson Welles' The Trial, another film about a man who finds himself trapped in the vice of the world's madness.

The Machinist has an ending that provides a satisfactory, or at least a believable, explanation for its mysteries and contradictions. But the movie is not about the plot, and while the conclusion explains Trevor's anguish, it doesn't account for it. The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness. The photography by Xavi Gimenez and Charlie Jiminez is cold slates, blues and greys, the palate of despair. We see Trevor's world so clearly through his eyes that only gradually does it occur to us that every life is seen through a filter.

We get up in the morning in possession of certain assumptions through which all of our experiences must filter. We cannot be rid of those assumptions, although an evolved person can at least try to take them into account. Most people never question their assumptions, and so reality exists for them as they think it does, whether it does or not. Some assumptions are necessary to make life bearable, such as the assumption that we will not die in the next 10 minutes. Others may lead us, as they lead Trevor, into a bleak solitude. Near the end of the movie, we understand him when he simply says, "I just want to sleep."

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