A Filmmaker's Review: "The Machinist" (2004)

This film is a god damn masterpiece and now, I have probably seen it about four or five times. Every single time you watch it, you see something you did not pick up before and every time you see the film the meaning of it gets closer and closer until you see something else and that changes the whole meaning entirely and you're back at square one. It's a film that constantly changes meaning.

Here's my history with the film. I saw it when it had already been out on DVD for a while and closer to when "The Dark Knight" came out rather than to when the film itself came out in the cinema. I watched it then because I was also quite into films like "Fight Club" and other psychological mind-fuck films at the time. I was also in the midst of some sort of reading spree and so, watching this got my mind off everything for about a week and a half until I could actually read paperback crime again.

I freaking love this film so much that I cannot actually tell you how I think about it every time I watch it. The first thing I think about is the incredible method acting done by Christian Bale in which he portrays a man driven slightly mad by his own faults and inabilities to sleep. It is a brilliant move by the actor in which to make his entire act about his own messed up timeline. It has an amazing time lapse in which you don't even notice it happening but it does happen. And then, when you hear all the people go 'you look like shit..." to him you realise that he must have looked different before because these people have known him for a while. It is only at the end of the movie that you realise yes, it was all so different before.

The weird cinematography in this film really pays off as well. It has a sort of Kubrickian-Nolanesque feel to it and really, I like the whole play with darkness and light and the way in which it looks very dystopian but also very contemporary. It's not like it is a dystopian future, it is a dystopian today. When it comes to the play of light and dark, we notice that most of the time when we're in the head of Trevor, it's dark. When we see what he sees and see his thoughts, when we follow his character and do as he does, everything is either dark or fading into darkness. The hallway in the houses when we follow him early in the morning near 1:30 - it is dark. This is a part of his character and not just a part of the film to make dark look darker through dialogue. It is made for dark characters to look darker through their awareness.

The other aspects of the cinematography include the close-ups and the tracking shots which I think are incredible to give us signs of what is happening to this character and how his physical and mental state are deteriorating in front of us. It is an incredible state to watch because you know that it is happening and you want to think he's not crazy because he's the only character we watch in a non-limited (omniscient) perspective and so, he's the only one we can trust. When things begin to change and shift, we feel our trust falling apart and the further our trust falls apart, the more we come to realise that this character may not be as reliable as we once thought. The shift in the narrative happens just at the point when he's hanging out with the lady's kid on that train thing and when you notice it and add it on to all the other things that have been happening, it really comes to be something quite remarkable. Each and every stop on that train becomes far more than just a ride.

In conclusion, I think that this film is one of those that you can watch over and over again and still not have the entire meaning. There's so many great angles from which to view this movie in terms of its story, themes, characters and most importantly, its metaphors. It has brilliant dialogue within the scenes especially in which Trevor is talking to the person who apparently does not exist. I hope more people watch this movie and learn how much of a masterpiece it truly is.