Nine Inch Nails meets Dostoyevsky

Rating: 8/10 (22 June 2005)

This is a very good, if not excellent, psychological thriller that may suffer a bit from a "too little, too late" syndrome as well as a slight emotional disconnect with the viewer.
Christian Bale is Trevor Reznick (the name seems to be a pun on the man who is Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor). Reznick works as the titular machinist in a strange, unnamed town. When the film begins, Trevor looks beat up. We see him roll up a body in a rug and drive it in his pick up truck to eventually dump it in a body of water. He has trouble getting it down a concrete incline. Just as it's about to fall in--the viewer can't actually tell if the body will make it or get stuck on the bottom of the incline, someone approaches Trevor and questions him.
Very quickly, director Brad Anderson cuts to another point in time. We learn some odd things about Trevor, who still looks awful even though he's no longer beat-up at this different time. Apparently he hasn't been able to sleep in a year. He is so thin he looks skeletal and extremely unhealthy (achieved by Bale incredibly almost abusing himself for the role--he lost 60 pounds, or a third of his weight). He's emotionally alienated from his blue-collar job. He spends his nights either with his prostitute girlfriend, Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) or at the airport diner, talking to Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Even more oddly, he runs into a strange man named Ivan (John Sharian) in the parking lot at work. Ivan, who seems slightly prescient and dangerous, has just taken over the shift of the usual arc welder. After Ivan distracts Trevor to the point that he causes a serious accident, others claim that there is no such man working at the machine shop. Who is Ivan? Why are others denying knowledge of him? What was that opening scene all about? The Machinist is a slow, hallucinatory descent into a nightmare world for Trevor. Can he discover the truth and find his way out?
The Machinist fits rather neatly into two relatively recent subgenres. It is both a "rubber reality" and "Hell handbasket" film. "Rubber reality" is coming into fairly common usage. For a description of "Hell handbasket", see my review of The Out-of-Towners (1970). As a rubber reality film, The Machinist bears resemblances to fare as diverse as Identity (2003), Mulholland Drive (2001), eXistenZ (1999)--also starring Leigh, by the way, Memento (2000) and The Sixth Sense (1999). Like another rubber reality film, The Matrix (1999), The Machinist takes a literary work as something of a subtextual compatriot. In the case of The Matrix, the subtextual pairing was with Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Here, Anderson invokes Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Early on, we see Trevor reading Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and later, we see a reference to his novel Crime and Punishment. Both references comment on the underlying nature of The Machinist, one in parallel, the other more ironically, but we could also see both as parallels given a more phenomenological progression of events.
That kind of "deeper" intellectualism is prominent in rubber reality films; the ontology tends to reflect similar ideas rooted in both philosophy--especially postmodernism, and the sciences--especially some of the conventional views about and implications of quantum mechanics. However, one of the slight problems with The Machinist, in my eyes, at least, was that as a rubber reality film, it might be just a bit _too_ straightforward and transparent. Part of that, though, is surely that by now, we've seen so many rubber reality films that these twists, turns and reinterpretations are almost predictable. The genre seems to have hinged at least a bit on its mindjob abilities, and predictability isn't exactly compatible with that.
But Anderson mostly makes up for the film's simplicity and transparency with thick atmosphere. The atmosphere is aided by Roque Baños' Bernard Herrmannesque score, but it is especially conveyed by the tasty cinematography, which is extremely desaturated--almost approaching black and white at times. It suggests an appropriate desolation. This is also reflected in the locations and set designs. On the "making of" documentary included on the DVD, Anderson says that he was aiming for making Barcelona, Spain--where the film was shot--look like Los Angeles, where it was apparently set per the script. However, he did something better than that. He made Barcelona look otherworldly, eerie and desert-like in its architectural space.
These visual attitudes of desolation and desertedness are paralleled with Bale's creepy, disturbing-looking thinness (somewhat suggestive of Thinner, 1996), which is subtextually correlated with Reznik's psychological state. In these respects, The Machinist is an ingenious artistic work.
However, even though a kind of distancing or overall atmosphere of alienation is appropriate, and the cast masterfully achieves it, that disposition can prove to be a problem for a viewer trying to "get into" the film. For example, my wife didn't like The Machinist nearly as much as I did. For her, the film was a bit too slow and uneventful, without much provided to grab on to the characters. That criticism makes sense if you're not a fan of more deliberate, subtle films like this (and that describes my wife fairly well). But if you aren't primarily looking for something fast paced or action packed and you have a ken for thematic subtlety and complexity, The Machinist just might fit your bill for a relatively twisted and gloomy thriller.