What to make of a film that names its protagonist Trevor Reznik (basically the same as Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor) and has a mystical guru with supernatural abilities dressed up like Morpheus? Obvious isn't really the word. Self-conscious gets closer. Silly's probably the most accurate. But calling a film for which the lead actor lost sixty pounds to become so emaciated as to threaten his own existence silly just seems like bad form.
What mostly makes the film silly is that from nearly the first frame Anderson is setting the audience up for the Big Twist. But twist endings are hard to pull off. They have to be completely unexpected but at the same time they must also provide the only resolution that makes any sense. And to be most effective they have to cast everything that has come before in a new light. If you don't have the balls or the ability (Anderson and writer Scott Kosar (who tellingly wrote this script straight out of film school) have neither) to pull off an effective twist, choice number two for this sort of film is to make everything a mystery so that the twist really just provides a solution that the audience has been guessing at the whole film. This, however, also has its problems, namely that if the filmmakers don't make the mystery itself compelling, the audience essentially stops watching the film and instead is just waiting for the answer to the riddle. This can, of course, be effective, especially if the answer is completely unexpected yet still makes total sense. But again, we are not dealing with that level of filmmaker here.
No, in The Machinist you have a lot of mood and basically nothing else. It took most of my willpower (or laziness) not to reach for the remote and jump to the end to see what the big damn deal is. And, unfortunately, when the twist is revealed it turns out to be quite ordinary and boring and, most damningly, it fails to provide a motivation for the extreme emaciation of the protagonist. At least if it had done that I might not have been pissed off at the film. But goddammit, if Christian Bale is going to put his life on the line for this part, there'd better be some compelling reason for him to do so. But instead it's just more of that mood nonsense.
And so The Machinist really boils down to being just about that weight loss and how alien Bale looks. His character is trying to lose weight for some indeterminate reason and keeps track of his progress with Post-Its on the wall. If his wasting away physically was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for his wasting away mentally, it seems pretty silly that he would be wanting to lose that weight. (In fairness there's no evidence that he's trying to lose weight. He could just as easily be documenting it. But in a country in which people only ever weigh themselves to see how much they've lost, this is certainly not perceptive filmmaking.) Having Reznik keep track of his weight like this also removes the only plausible reason for his weight loss, that he is dead and disintegrating. The weight loss in that scenario would make sense but would, I guess, have been too predictable so that is not the Big Secret.
No, the Big Secret is that he killed someone and that the grief is killing him. Brilliance. Glad I saw a hundred minute movie to tell me that killing a person would make you sick with guilt. I could never have figured that out on my own.
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