The Players…
Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, John Sharian and Michael Ironside.
The Story…
Industrial machinist Trevor Reznik has been suffering from insomnia for a year. His physical and mental health have all but wasted away. So much that when he keeps finding cryptic Post-Its creepily popping up in his apartment suggesting his next courses of action, he asks himself is it just the lack of sleep, or has his mind really gone? Who’s leaving these notes? What are they trying to say? And what’s with the kooky new guy at work who knows too much about Trevor’s plight? It’s impossible to keep it all clear.
If only he could sleep on it.
The Rant (2013)…
Ever have insomnia? Sure you have. I’ve had many a sleepless night, none of it romantic. And the next day…well, let’s just say that sleep dep’ makes everything really neat. The sunlight seems brighter. The sounds seem noisier. The idea of breakfast makes you wanna puke. Or that’s just your vacant stomach demanding caffeine. Anyways, you plum don’t feel like yourself. It feels like a second reality. The kind you wish you could wake up from.
If you’re a casual watcher of psycho thrillers, this film’s for you. Otherwise it requires an attention span. Like I said, Bale is a fright, both physical (especially physical) and mental. Quick to rile, slow to even out, paranoid and prone to rage. Like I said, the ravages of insomnia. What’s amazing about this film is how deep Bale’s commitment was to this role. He’s tense, intense and minus pretense (how’s that for pseudo-alliteration?). A tragic figure of his own undoing. His capacity for frothing rage in the face of paranoia is just a shade over the top. That’s a minor carp overall. But it’s also kinda handy since there is not a single scene which Bale is not in. You really ride along with Reznik’s character, through the ugly and the…other stuff.
The only problem with this film is the pacing, and it’s not by much. Bale is so quick to rile it becomes bookmarks for each chapter of the film. Don’t get me wrong, Bale nails paranoid anger very well, but when it repeats itself to the point of minute-on reaction, well the novelty runs thin after awhile.
Otherwise the acting was impeccable. It was difficult not to relate to any of the characters. Like I said, Bale embodies the sleepless nights and the trippy days we’ve all had because of it. He carried the whole film, and quite well and tastefully too. Strong shoulders, even in light of the juicy paranoia that Reznik starts to inhabit well too quick.
Rant Redux (2019)…
The above take on The Machinist was direct and concise. Upon review, it was too direct and concise. There was a lot more going on beneath the surface with this movie, which was its raison d’etre; all is not as it seems.
Uh, duh.
In retrospect, I’m gonna dub Machinist‘s style as “Hitchcock with teeth.” Fangs is more like it. It’s an engaging, unpleasant mystery minus any McGuffin. To review, that was a term Hitch himself coined describing the plot device that drives the story. Kinda like the schematics to the first Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope, or the titular Maltese Falcon. Can insomnia be considered that? I guess kinda sorta not really, but Reznik’s lack of sleep does push the story along. Following that line of logic, and Anderson’s tip of his sombrero to the Master, it’s the grimy, creepy atmosphere that drives the plot. The sticky, ugly cramps of not knowing if your awake or dreaming. More to the point, it’s that icky, universal feeling of being too damned tired to think straight. You know when you can’t sleep and all you can think about is getting to sleep? It bites. No slang here. Andersen delivers Hitch with teeth.
The hardest part to take in Machinist is how everything comes undone/comes into focus at the very butt end of the third act. In the last twenty minutes—if that—the true story comes at you with a slap. Wake up. The climax rightfully undoes what we have be watching for the past 90 minutes, and you realize all that was window dressing, entwined with a psychotic, nightmare mystery. I felt generally disturbed at the finale.
And cheated. Machinist tried to follow the same tack as Nolan’s Memento, but without the clever gimmick of amnesia. Most of us have never suffered terminal short-term memory loss; all of us have suffered from insomnia, and in a weird way the side effects are low-level similar. The hazy, gauzy disconnected world of Reznik reflects ours after no sleep for too long (kinda like Hell Week when I was rushing my fraternity, and that’s another story). In simpler terms, and us as the audience: “The f*ck is going on here?” It’s not out of frustration, not stemming from a hard-to-follow Lynch/Tarantino hybrid, not even old school Hitch bamboozling you with Vertigo.
Nope. Machinist preys on the warped perceptions of reality that come about after wrestling with your sweaty pillow and losing. What I’m getting at is Machinist is creepy, curious, terse and uncomfortable. And crams a lot of mystery in a rather short running time. It’s one of the those flicks you gotta rewatch to “get it.” If that.
There. I think that fleshes things out a bit better than Christian Bale’s gaunt frame. Now get some sleep. Again.
The Revision…
Rent it or relent it? Sustained: rent it. Watch it twice to appreciate its Hitchcock love letter. After a good night’s rest, doy.
Next Installment…
Through a cracked mirror Ryan Reynolds seemed like a good choice as Green Lantern. It was a case of fanboy blogger’s very green writing. Shut up.