Directed by Brad Anderson Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Lee

When
people refer to a film as being less than the sum of its parts, it’s
all too easy to picture the brown-nosing boyscout-isms of effort over
talent. That isn’t the case here. Director Brad Anderson (Session 9)
understands the need for atmosphere above story, throttling his film
with filthy industrial greys and the bleached-out colours of the
already dead. As for Christian Bale, his twig-thin protagonist
represents the zenith of actorly self-harm – a truly astonishing
achievement.

Bale plays Trevor Reznik, a sleep and sustenance
deprived loner paying a terrible price for a nameless crime. Reznik
inhabits an anaemic netherworld where everything is a copy of a copy of
a copy, and his only human contact is with a kindly waitress in an
airport café (Aitána Sanchez-Gijón) and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s
tired-looking hooker, who’d sooner feed him than fuck him. He’s the
ultimate man-who-wasn’t-there: a twitching, thick-tongued train-wreck,
as 2D and mysterious as the accusatory Post-it notes that appear
randomly on his fridge.

And herein lies the film’s main
problem, for in the absence of a large enough mystery on which to hang
Bale’s extraordinary sacrifice, we’re left with sixth form symbolism –
all ghost-trains and guilt – that at times is so thick it verges on
innuendo.

In a way this shouldn’t matter, for The Machinist is
as much a moody character study as a suspense film, it’s just that
Reznik’s existential nightmare is as starved of depth as he is of food,
and it sometimes feels like we’re watching the disintegration of a
specimen rather than a man. Thankfully all is not lost, for as the film
finds its momentum in the latter stages, so too do the nudge-nudging
clues as to what’s really amiss double and redouble in significance.

In
a genre where Pi and Memento have already blown away the precedents,
perhaps a story this slight can never be wholly satisfying.
Nevertheless, with slightly sharper material and a little more
subtlety, Anderson is sure to go onto greater things, and Bale’s
physical embodiment of the lead role will go down as one of the most
fucked-up footnotes in thespian history.