Andersonville...

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2006)

***SPOILERS*** When the unbelievable horrors of the Andersonville prison camp were made known following The Civil War (a most un-civil affair), the survivors looked not unlike Christian Bale in this movie; same reason(s), too (near starvation). There have been actors whose performances have hinged, to one degree or another, on their appearances (and I'm not talking here about "glamorous" looks; I'm talking, of course, about the chameleon-like transformations of actors like Robert DeNiro in RAGING BULL or John Hurt in THE ELEPHANT MAN, to cite but two). Nothing that has come before (so far as I can recall, with the possible exception of documentary footage of German concentration camp survivors) can prepare the viewer for Bale's appearance; it's that unsettling. Having stressed out for years while driving a taxi at night in a city acrawl with crack-heads, I can relate to the sleeplessness that plagues the machinist (said stress contributing, in the end, to a heart attack in my own case and quintuple bypass heart surgery). Guilt is the dagger of the mind (so Shakespeare tells us in MACBETH and Poe in THE TELL-TALE HEART). If you're interested in gritty, often surreal film-making (the music, which sounds a lot like the music from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, helps set the tone, as it were), don't miss THE MACHINIST.