The World According to Trevor

Rating: 7/10 (29 July 2005)

Even though "The Sixth Sense" came first, raked in more dough, and established that GOTCHA! third act twist that re-defined everything that had gone on before, "Fight Club" took a route that was more psychological (and satirical) and less gimmicky and ultimately suffered at the box office for being too damn subversive and challenging for audiences expecting a bare-knuckles movie about, y'know, guys beating each other up. In that film, we follow an insomniac narrator who takes charge of his nihilistic life with the aid of anti-corporate crusader Tyler Durden, who winds up being nothing more than a figment of the narrator's imagination. It's a testament to the cleverness and believability of this twist that it has been mined pretty successfully in subsequent films like "Session 9," "Secret Window," "High Tension," and now "The Machinist," a film as frightening as it is compelling, with an uncanny psychological depth and a keen eye for detail.
Like the aforementioned films, "The Machinist" is quite disorienting upon first glance--its ending requires the viewer to all but re-start the movie to find out what it all means. Patience is essential to get into the rhythm of the film, which is deliberately paced and builds gradually to its turns, both expected and unexpected. If you expect a movie to lay down all the facts, explain every detail, and come to a tidy conclusion, you might want to bypass "The Machinist." Directed by Brad Anderson (who helmed the brilliant "Session 9") from a script by Scott Kosar (the same man who graced us with the loathsome "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake), "The Machinist" is the tale of Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), an industrial worker harboring immense feelings of guilt for unknown reasons--he hasn't slept in a year as a result, and has starved himself down to a dangerously low weight (though the image of an emaciated Bale is not the film's most harrowing aspect); his bosses and coworkers are uneasy around him, and one day he causes a gruesome accident while distracted by the mysterious Ivan (a brilliantly cast John Sharian), a fellow worker who might not even exist. Anchored to reality by a sympathetic hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and an airport waitress (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), Trevor is plagued by cryptic messages on post-it notes that somehow wind up in his apartment, the most grim being a 6-letter hangman with two letters already filled in.
In the paranoid stew brought about by his guilt, Trevor's perception becomes that of a mad conspiracy theorist who believes the ultimate plot is against himself...and who is to say it isn't? There is a brilliant sequence within the bowels of a carnival ride, where every image--from a corpse with its guts splattered to the silhouetted customers inside a brothel--triggers a twinge of panic in Trevor that makes us wonder how much of this is an actual ride, and how much is imagined (or amplified) by his guilt-riddled conscience. The ultimate beauty of "The Machinist" is that it endures past its revelation because the world we have just watch unfold, with characters we THOUGHT we knew, turns out to be the product of a sleep-deprived (and, at a whole year, certifiably insane) mind; at the same time, this also reflects the kind of person Trevor Reznik aspired to be in the wake of the crime he perpetrated. The film's title and the oppressive, grease-stained factory environment lends it to a moody metaphor: was Reznik really a machinist, or was the scenario a representation of his swaying conscience, as gears turn clockwise and counterclockwise inside metal boxes as machines are turned on or off and are at times unstoppable for discernible reason, thus causing unforeseen tragedy? In addition to its loftier ambitions, "The Machinist" is calmly effortless in showing how clever it is without being showy--which is why the film warrants multiple viewings. The amount of foreshadowing and character flip-flops and real-life incidents transposed into Reznik's remorseful fantasy world is done with an incredible amount of care. Seemingly trivial details, like a fishing rod on a closet shelf; a close-up of a sticker; the image of bumper cars in the foreground while Trevor talks to the waitress' son, all have a soul-shattering impact that is impossible to uncover upon a single viewing. Like the bastard child of "Spider" and "Fight Club," "The Machinist" is a persistent challenge, an ultimately bleak glimpse into the life of a man whose mind has been hollowed by guilt even more so than his body.