Thought I'd offer a post interview review of Brad Anderson's excellent film The Machinist. I find more to this film every time I watch it.
MACHINIST REVIEW
Paramount Classics
Dir Brad Anderson
102 min Rated R for sexual situations, violence and language.
The psychological thriller is having both a comeback and a hard time. Often judged, inappropriately, as one would judge a mystery film, the psych-thriller winds up being weighed according to whether or not we can “figure it out”. Of course the difference between mysteries and psych-thrillers is that the revelatory moment in a mystery is about “whodunit” while in a psych-thriller we care about the “whydunit.” The evil that men do is key to both but in the psych thriller we're often called to a much more complex relationship.
This concept seems to elude many critics who dismiss movies like Vanilla Sky, The Forgotten, The Village, Signs and Identity - all films that invite deeper analysis than whether or not their twist endings entertain sufficiently. And it certainly eludes studios who market their movies as almost anything other than what they are. Would The Village have been as critically derided as it was were it not marketed primarily as a film with a twist ending? But this is the point: The psychological thriller has not only been given the short shrift from critics as a genre but as a sought after viewer experience. Audiences want to see these films for more than their twist endings but, too often, aren't invited to do so.
Brad Anderson's last two films, both psychological thrillers have suffered from non-existant to middling marketing and critical obtuseness. One can only hope this won't dissuade him from further exploration of a type of storytelling that he not only clearly understands but has mined with cinematic skill and emotional resonance.
His latest entry The Machinist is a case in point. Ostensibly offering a mystery it slowly reveals itself to be a meditation on paranoia, guilt and the power of confession. The film opens with an out of focus shot that depicts something we've all seen in dozens of films. But the score, the lighting, and the incredibly malnourished form of the film's main character, tell us that something more is going on here than the fulfilling of genre tropes. We soon discover that the character hasn't slept for a year, that he washes his hands with bleach and that he is involved in a series of conflicting relationships; a blossoming romance with a beautiful waitress, ongoing visitations to a prostitute that he is both friend and customer to.
Trevor Reznick is a man of contradictions, moral and physical. His gaunt physique seems almost as defined and jointed as the machines he works. His slow progress through the world is juxtaposed with sudden quick darting movements of his eyes that seem to grab the details of the world around him. He used to get along well with his co-workers but now finds himself the subject of hostility because of his sudden weightloss and drugged like mental state- a sure sign of bad things to come in a room where danger is just a moment of distraction away.
Bale is a revelation as Reznick not so much because of his much vaunted and genuinely shocking 63 lb weight loss but because he clearly puts so much trust in the character as defined by writer Scot Kosar. Disappearing into the text Bale finds the heart and soul of a man who is literally eating himself away, who is on the verge of disappearing and whose final shattering self revelation leads us to question our own casual judgement.
And Bale is supported by an impressive technical virtuosity. Anderson frames his shots to isolate the character, backgrounding him in bleakness, and providing endless visual clues for not only the "solution" of the film's mystery but for the larger mystery of how we hide from the marker's providence provides.
The Machinist is on a par with another great film The Pledge starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Sean Penn. I don't recommend a double feature but I do recommend you see them both. But in both cases don't watch them to figure out their mystery. Watch them to get in tune with a greater mystery, that of the human spirit, the fallen nature and the white noise of a mind that hears only it's own wisdom.
Dave Canfield