Vanilla Sky Through Blue Collar Eyes

Rating: 7/10 (23 March 2005)

* * Potential Spoiler Alert * *
Somewhere between Fight Club and Memento lies a film steeped in so many red herrings it beats a Norwegian canary ship any day of the week. However, unlike its maritime equivalents, The Machinist doesn't stink.
It tries, with valiance and fortitude, to rekindle the languid Who the Hell Am I genre, a strand of cinema lurking in the shadows since acceptable Identity of two years ago. To attain this goal, The Machinist spins a gossamer story revolving around Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), a skeletal city dweller working at one of the anonymous locale's unionized machine shops. As the film opens, we know next to nothing about Trevor, but quickly begin to realize there's something seriously wrong with him, for the man's so thin he's next to non-existent, as several fellow characters so accurately note. In fact, how the hell excellent Bale went from lady killer hunk in American Psycho and Equilibrium to 110 lb stick man remains the movie's mainstay mystery.
Reznik's haunted by an unknown trauma from his past. We fathom this from clues strewn about the plot rather than direct revelation, as well as from observing the lead's interaction with other personas. Soon thereafter, Reznik begins to see things, most vivid of which is Ivan (Marlon Brando-esquire John Sharian), a strange shop co-worker nobody else even knows about. Following a gruesome accident at work in which another of Reznik's colleagues suffers the odd severed hand (good as always Michael Ironside), Trevor proceeds to finally lose it to the point of endangering relationships with the few people who can still tolerate his eccentricity, like golden-hearted prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), a kind waitress Trevor confides in during his ceaseless bouts with insomnia.
The movie's basic premise brings to mind other entries in the genre, alluding to a crisis of being and questions regarding the very essence of supposed realities. Through Trevor we perhaps shed light on escaping our torrid memories, for he too is always on the verge of discovering some cataclysmic moment in time that changed everything and could account for the many abnormalities he suffers from, such as extreme emaciation and being unable to sleep for over a year. For good or bad, The Machinist concerns itself mostly with throwing non-stop curve balls, for its story is riddled with dead-end head fakes like the notes Trevor leaves himself on a fridge filled with bloody, chopped-up fish and his entirely curious alter-ego who, although gratifying, ends up of little consequence. Likewise, occasional The Wire and The Shield director Brad Anderson went to great pains in pumping proceedings with incessant, clever foreshadowing, both visual and via dialogue. Upon watching the movie again, you'll glean pleasure from giggling at the significance of certain one liners and phrases denoting things to come, yet much like the plot proper they too lead down stray paths.
Stylized and atmospheric with ample accompaniment by eerie sounds capes, The Machinist does work well as a free-from exercise in psychedelic, lyrical anarchy. At its very core lies an almost random progression even less coherent than Trevor's feverish mind, and we're lucky to get the modicum of resolution at the end that it so miserly dishes out. However, and as frustrating as never getting too close to what is "really" going on can be, The Machinist impersonates traditional cinema quite nicely, just like its Catalan locations do a believable job standing in for generic California, and for that kind of pleasantry forgiving it the open-ended enigmas can be a piece of cake.
Rating * * *