almost in spite of, or despite, the shabby been-there-done-that script, and a near gimmick of weight loss, Bale makes it watchable

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2008)

The Machinist is kind of like intellectual counterfeit money, and with a few twists meant to keep some interested and some keeping far as possible away. The more one thinks about the Machinist, the more it's irksome by the cluttered screenplay (Scott Kosar, with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Amityville Horror remakes to his credit), which reveals no surprise, or much suspense, in the mental downfall of one-year insomniac Trevor Reznik (mega-gaunt Christian Bale, even more-so than in the recent, more worthy cause Rescue Dawn) as he keeps seeing a portly bald guy named Ivan who may or may not work at the factory he's a machinist at, and may or may not be dating a prostitute (Jennifer Jason Leigh), AND who may or may not have taken a little boy Trevor sort of knows as hostage.
By the time the obvious twist comes along- the kind that my girlfriend points out about a third of the way through the movie, aw-hell!- there's a feeling of being cheated from the smug retread of better post-modern psycho-twister fables (i.e. Fight Club). That Kosar does 'clever' tricks like putting in Dostoyevsky hints, without ever making much light about why they're there, compounds some of the BS. It's a shame, too, because he sometimes gives these characters some believable dialog (mostly with the machinists and in some of Reznik's talk), without trying to take into account a conceit that is used: an insomniac for a year is, practically, not possible, hence there has to be a catch at some point or another. It's almost like a battle that wages on the creative side of things between director Anderson's very good compositions and (typical-for-this-stuff) lighting, and the script.
Meanwhile, Bale holds up, even if after the fact it's a wonder why he went to such extreme lengths for a character like this (i.e. would losing 40 pounds be any different than the whole 60). Bale remains totally captivating, immersing as always in service of the character like the most method m-fer since De Niro, though in the reverse here. Because it is such an extreme transformation- unlike the more gradual turn in Herzog's film- we're called attention to it at times, which is unnerving, and works to a much greater effect as a sign of his deterioration than that of the script providing the mental faculties. But Bale does his best to fill in some emotional blanks, and to his credit makes the Machinist at least a passable effort. That being said, it's hard for me to see myself watching this all the way through again.