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| THE MACHINIST HOME: movies.zertinet.com |
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If there was an award for commitment to a part, Christian Bale (“American Psycho”) would surely win it this year. Starving himself to play Trevor Reznik in “The Machinist” and losing several dozen pounds in the process, Bale is truly a shocking sight to behold, emaciated to the point that we are genuinely concerned for his health. Then again, it is essential to the film’s success that we are disturbed by this curious character, intrigued as to what has brought him to this horrific extreme. The majority of the film wades through a series of clues to Reznik’s psychosis. He can’t sleep, and we soon learn has been unable to sleep for the last year. He starts finding weird notes around his apartment. He meets a strange character at his factory job, who causes him to make a bloody accident, only to discover later that no one knows who he is talking about and no such person is on the payroll. But that’s just the beginning. Soon he starts to suspect that Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his favorite prostitute and pseudo-girlfriend, is involved in some sort of a conspiracy against him, just as the audience starts to suspect that Reznik – frail, tired, and paranoid – is at the edge of a full-blown breakdown. However, the power generated by these terse and haunting performances is ultimately muted by a story that takes one too many random diversions. “The Machinist” falls victim to the “Usual Suspects” syndrome, in which random surprises and unpredictable subplots serve as successful distractions, but have no grounding in the larger story or final explanation, which in “The Machinist” is plausible but still somehow unsatisfying. Films like this start strong, tempting us into its mysterious web of mystery. But when that web becomes increasingly disjointed, created randomly out of thin air and without a central theme to connect its sporadic “revelations,” we soon tire of the game, our fascination replaced by irritation and, eventually, apathy.
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