The Machinist

Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is only nominally about crime and not literally about punishment. Not in the judicial sense of the word. It’s about the punishment the psyche imposes upon oneself. ‘Crime and Punishment’ is about the crushing weight of guilt.

It’s another Dostoyevsky novel (‘The Idiot’) that Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) reads in Brad Anderson’s ‘The Machinist’, but it’s not the Christ-like man-child Prince Myshkin to whom Reznik invites comparison. Imagine Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of ‘Crime and Punishment’, not as an idealistic yet compromised student but a blue-collar factory worker. Imagine he hasn’t slept properly for a year. Imagine that he spends his evenings at an airport coffee shop where he cultivates a stilted but poignant rapport with waitress Maria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) and his nights in the company of call girl Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – an archetype of the Dostoyevskan “fallen woman” if ever there was one.

If I seem to be overdoing the whole Dostoyevsky thing, it’s because Scott Kosar’s script and Anderson’s stylized but atmospheric direction continually draw attention to the parallels. It’s particularly fascinating that Kosar – whose other produced screenplays have been for the remakes of horror genre staples ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘The Amityville Horror’ and ‘The Crazies’ – dabbling in a psychological drama so explicitly inspired by one of the heaviest hitters in all of literature.

‘The Machinist’ superficially unfolds as a thriller – Hitchcock as if filtered through David Lynch – with Reznik blamed for the industrial accident which costs a colleague his arm, and sent to Coventry by his colleagues. Gaunt, hollow-eyed and painfully thin, even before his involvement in the accident Reznik is drawing the wrong kind of attention from the management, who want him to take a random drugs test. Taking a smoking break to cool off, he meets the mysterious Ivan (John Sharian) who tells him he’s standing in for a co-worker. It’s Ivan who distracts Reznik at the crucial moment, deliberately it seems, and Reznik is left looking highly blameworthy when the shit hits the fan. Things take a strange turn when colleagues and management alike profess to never having heard of Ivan.

Cryptic notes resembling a game of hangman turn up in Reznik’s apartment. He catches his eccentric landlady Mrs Shrike (Anna Massey) letting herself in. Stevie turns up with a black eye; she describes it as an “occupational hazard”, but Reznik wonders if it’s courtesy of her “psychotic” ex. Reznik starts to suspect that said ex is Ivan.

And what’s Ivan’s connection with Maria’s son?

The thriller aesthetic, albeit tempered by low-key character-based scenes, defines the first two thirds of the movie. A photo lifted from Ivan’s wallet points Reznik towards someone at the factory. The alignment of letters in the hangman notes suggest the surname of someone else. A ride on a ghost train seems to trigger memories. Scenes are rhymed. Images are revisited and recontextualized. Symbolism is rife: a tunnel or passageway branching off in two directions; tableaux in the ghost train ride that prove analogous to events in Reznik’s life; landmarks which seem imbued with relevance even before the big reveal.

The last third contains some real narrative curveballs. The linearity becomes suspect. What’s taking place in the present? In the past? In Reznik’s increasingly disturbed mind? The film almost completely deconstructs before the pieces are reordered and everything is explained.

‘The Machinist’ is almost too clever for its own good, particularly in the inclusion of certain tropes which are highly reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’. There are some significant literary references – look out for the placement (and I do mean the literal placement) of the Kafka reference – which are at odds with the casual manner Anderson tries to incorporate them. Also, the big reveal is done with such accomplished cinematic sleight of hand that the directorial flourish threatens to outweigh the emotional cachet of the scene. Fortunately, Anderson knows exactly how to structure the film and exactly where to cut or transition a scene; and the whole thing is anchored by a cluster of excellent performances.

Rescue Dawn

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 100 of 100

Okay, maybe this is a bit of a cheat – I’ve already reviewed ‘Rescue Dawn’ on The Agitation of the Mind; back in November 2007, during the blog’s first month of existence – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the right film to end the Operation 101010 project on.

The first title I reviewed for Operation 101010, on 20 January 2010, was Werner Herzog’s astounding documentary ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’. ‘Rescue Dawn’ is his feature film exposition of the same story. The same narrative perameters apply: German-American Dieter Dengler is driven to become a pilot. He enlists, trains and is sent to Vietnam. He is shot down over Laos, captured, endures inhumane conditions and eventually escapes.

My original piece on ‘Rescue Dawn’ was a mere 240 words, by far the shortest review I’ve posted on the blog. When I wrote it, I felt that Tim’s review on Antagony & Ecstasy said all that needed to be said; his article certainly reflected my feelings on the film. I concluded: “There’s much to admire … And yet … this is Herzog in the jungle. This should be ‘Aguirre’ with planes, ‘Fitzcarraldo’ goes ’Nam. What it is, ultimately, is a dichotomy. It’s simultaneously one of the best things I’ve seen in a multiplex this year and arguably the most ordinary thing in Herzog’s filmography.”

So now, rounding out a bizarre triple-bill that started with ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘Seven’, I find myself concluding today’s movie marathon with my first viewing of ‘Rescue Dawn’ since November 2007. And I still maintain that it’s an exceptionally well-made film, with a sterling performance from Christian Bale as Dengler (who starved himself to the kind of skeletal frame he exhibited in ‘The Machinist’) and an excellent supporting turn from Steve Zahn (as Duane, Dengler’s closest friend in captivity). To see Zahn – who usually does smug, wiseass, or smug wiseass – delve into a hitherto unexplored capacity as an actor is a revelatory. Jeremy Davies gives his usual wild-eyed, flapping hands, strangulated syntax Jeremy Davies performance, but I find him less annoying in ‘Rescue Dawn’ than most of his other films.

Peter Zeitlinger’s cinematography, while never quite reaching the mystic/poetic visuals of ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, is never less than evocative. Herzog’s script is focused and direct: ten minutes in, Dengler’s plane is down; less than twenty minutes in, he’s captured; by the half hour mark he’s at a PoW camp and starting to think about escaping. Herzog captures the banal, routines and unpredictable outbursts of violence from the guards that characterize life in the prison camp. He charts the physical depletion of the captives and their desperation in eating grubs and suffering dysentery. He has an ear for their camaraderie and banter, too, but without descending into cliché or jingoism.

(Parenthetically, the ending – which I did find hopelessly jingoistic first time round – I have since learned is depicted pretty much as it happened. So fair dues.)

The escape comes about two thirds of the way into the movie, two groups of prisoners striking out in different directions. The rest of the film follows Dengler and Duane as they trek arduously through the jungle, trying to evade Laotian troops while attracting the attention of the occasional US helicopter or search plane.

‘Rescue Dawn’ is, by turns, exciting, grueling, suspenseful and (finally) cathartic. From most contemporary directors, this would be top-of-their-game stuff – possibly a masterpiece. From Herzog, it’s curiously pedestrian, but it proves that (a) even cinema’s premier maverick can turn in a conventional, mainstream work and (b) Herzog should always be a freakin’ maverick.

The reinvention of the bat

Now don’t get me wrong: I like George Clooney. A lot. But it has to be said: ‘Batman and Robin’ is a piece of shit. It was my friend Paul who delivered the most accurate and coruscating verdict on ‘Batman and Robin’: “It says something when a movie’s got Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox in it – and you still walk out halfway through.”

‘Batman and Robin’ is what it had come to. It made the Adam West incarnation of Batman look like an exercise in documentary realism. It made the lacklustre ‘Batman Forever’, in which the mantle so convincingly worn by Michael Keaton was transmogrified into a mooching slab of banality by Val Kilmer, look like a rediscovered masterpiece by Powell & Pressburger. It made a five year old with a snot nose and scabby knees running through a council estate screaming “nana-nana-nana-nana, nana-nana-nana-nana, BATMAAAAANNN!” at the top of his voice look like Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. It made –

*steels himself*

*gnashes teeth*

*types the motherfucker anyway*

– it made ‘Twilight’ look like a proper film.

In short, ‘Batman and Robin’ presented a pretty convincing argument for the end of the franchise. Only a madman or a genius would have attempted a reboot.

Enter Christopher Nolan. (Clue: he ain’t no madman.) Even then, if I’m being perfectly honest, I had my doubts. Taking my seat at Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema back in 2005 (a scant eight years after Joel Schumacher had raped the shit out of my sense of aesthetics in exactly the same cinema with ‘Batman and Robin’), I wondered if Nolan – who had delivered a minor masterpiece with ‘Memento’ and an assured big-name studio picture with ‘Insomnia’ – wasn’t making a mis-step.

Ten minutes in, with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) roughing it up in down and dirty style in some godforsaken prison, and I gave myself a mental rebuke for doubting Mr Nolan’s talent. An hour in, with Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson and Morgan Freeman delivering the goods and Bale himself wiping the slate clean in terms of how you portray Batman onscreen, and I was in hog heaven.

This was a Batman that was dark and nasty. Wilkinson’s Falcone was a proper mob boss, the kind of guy who’d shoot you in the head halfway through a meal and still be on coffee and desserts while his henchmen were dumping you in the harbour. Cillian Murphy’s Dr Crane (a.k.a Scarecrow) was a chilling and nightmarishly-visaged fiend … even before he put the freakin’ mask on! Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows were terrifying in their implacable certainty that their genocidal plans were the only reasonable option.

And then there was Bale’s Batman. You only need to remind yourself of Bale’s filmography. The man’s intense. His performances eviscerate. You could put him in ‘Teletubbies: the Movie’ and he’d tear the screen apart in an exegesis of method actor ferocity that would have the pre-school audience in therapy for decades. Or, to put it more simply, cast the man in a comic book movie and it stops being a comic book movie pretty damn quick.

Not that Nolan’s take on Batman was ever going to be comic book. There is very little of the gothic iconography that defines the comics. Nolan’s Gotham pays lip service with some shots of a monorail and the quasi-Victorian architecture of Arkham Asylum, but otherwise the film plays out across an unapologetically gritty milieu: the docks, the slums, Falcone’s downtown bar, an authentically grubby police precinct.

Case in point: it’s halfway into the film before Wayne dons the bat-suit. Most directors would mark the moment with a big, iconic close-up of Bruce Wayne as Batman, cape fluttering, zooming down through the night sky to combat villainy. Nolan does things differently. Nolan stages Batman’s first appearance during a drug deal, there various miscreants and heavies darting between containers as something – something shadowy and deadly and preternaturally fast – picks off their numbers one by one.

Context: Bruce Wayne picks his alter ego based on what scares him the most. Reasoning: if he conquers his own fear (pace the teachings of Ra’s Al Ghul), the very thing that scares him will terrify his enemies.

Nolan keeps the bat to the shadows. The effect is so much more devastating.

In a film that has only one weak spot – Katie Holmes’s indifferent performance – Nolan effortlessly portrays both sides of the persona, Bruce Wayne and Batman, as intertwined. Where most of the previous outings (only Burton’s first Batman film comes close to synthesising the two) unambiguously delineate Bruce Wayne the millionaire playboy and Batman the masked avenger, Nolan uses Wayne’s outward appearance of gentleman of leisure to strip away the concealing layers of his psyche and get to grips with the day-to-day hardships and psychological implications of leading what is essentially a double life.

‘Batman Begins’ gave the cinema-going public a credible, obsessively driven and sometimes vulnerable Batman. A gritty, ballsy Batman. A Batman largely free of glib one-liners and casual heroics. A superhero, in other words, for our troubled and ambiguous times.

Then he spent the two and a half hours of its genre-bending, expectation-shattering sequel demolishing every aspect of his anti-hero’s granite-like rectitude, irreversibly compromising Batman’s morality and turning him into a post-Guantanamo Bay one-man Patriot Act, beating the shit out of arrested suspects, clandestinely deporting foreign nationals, fucking over the basic civil liberties of every resident of Gotham (a Gotham, moreover, now free of monorails and Gothic buildings; a Gotham that could easily pass for New York) and basically proving right every naysayer who decries him as a vigilante. ‘The Dark Knight’ is the Ingmar Bergman of summer blockbusters, an unremittingly dark foray into the depths of its supposed hero’s ravaged humanity; a film whose gleefully amoral villain, Heath Ledger’s definitive Joker, remains utterly and perversely true to himself while forcing Batman at every turn to overturn every tenet of justice he stands for.

Earlier in this blogathon, Bryce linked to a thought-provoking and elegantly constructed essay at The Movie Blog which weighs the evidence of ‘Batman Begins’ as a deconstructionist or reconstructionist film and finds it reconstructionist. It’s an argument I’m entirely convinced by. But there’s no doubt that Nolan’s two Batman films are also reinventions.

David Bowie is Nikola Tesla: the unsung hero of The Prestige

Posted as part of Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blogathon at Things That Don’t Suck

The first time I saw ‘The Prestige’ – the first of three viewings on the big screen and umpteen more on DVD – I was struck by the charismatic actor playing Nikola Tesla. There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t give too much thought to the matter. I had other things to think about; ‘The Prestige’ is, after all, a thinking-caps-on kind of movie, one of those incredibly rare films that not only sucker-punches you with a hell of a twist first time round but gets even better on subsequent viewings when you know what’s coming and can marvel at the filmmakers’ skill in conjuring misdirections, concealing lacunae and – more impressive still – leaving enough ambiguity to allow for endless debates as to who was who and who knew what in any given scene.

I wholeheartedly love ‘The Prestige’. It’s easily my favourite movie of the last decade and my favourite Christopher Nolan film – with ‘The Dark Knight’ coming a close second*. It’s also a real bugger to write about (I originally reviewed it a year and half ago as part of the Personal Faves project) since you can’t get into any really interesting discussion without giving away an amazing double- (or possibly even triple-) whammy ending. And if there’s anyone reading these pages who hasn’t seen ‘The Prestige’, I want their first viewing of it to be as jaw-droppingly revelatory as mine.

The basic premise is a friendship that turns to rivalry between two magicians in the Victorian era: the working class Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and slumming-it aristocrat Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) – career bests, performance-wise, from both stars. It’s an adaptation of Christopher Priest’s epistolary novel which veers startlingly into science fiction in a denouement which explicitly homages an H.G. Wells novel.

Although Nolan, co-adapting with his brother Jonathan, wisely stops short of Priest’s OTT finale, a suspension of disbelief is still required for one of the big reveals (although it works brilliantly as a metaphorical device even if you don’t buy it as a plot point) which involves a device created by Tesla. Which is where we came in. And, like I said, I didn’t waste too much time sitting the cinema wondering who was playing Tesla. For me, he was Tesla.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor, one of the pioneers of electrical engineering. His work in the field of electricity favoured alternating current while his great rival Thomas Edison espoused direct current. History records Edison’s name as synonymous with electricity, but Tesla’s work – while tending on occasion to the more conceptual and eccentric – remains incredibly important. In a similar twist of fate, Tesla undertook some early and groundbreaking research into x-rays; however, it is Wilhelm Röntgen who is credited with discovering the technique (it also netted him the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901).

Tesla’s brilliance can be reckoned by the sheer amount of devices, principles and research he pioneered: rotating magnetic fields, the induction motor, voltage multiplication circuits, the arc light, polyphase systems, charged particle beam devices, the electronic logic gate (based on Babbage’s analytical engine), telegeodynamics, bladeless turbines, wireless electrical transfer, radio-controlled weaponry, theories on robotics and his famous (or infamous) Tesla coil.

He was eccentric. He claimed his genius was coterminous with his celibacy (though I guess that would explain Paris Hilton’s mediocrity!); he had a phobia of dirt; he ended his days in a room at the New Yorker Hotel. He kept pigeons in said hotel room. I’m still not sure how that squared with his abhorrence of dirt.

The Tesla of ‘The Prestige’, however, is the Tesla of middle age; the impeccably dressed, elegant, slightly formal, slightly aloof Tesla. The Tesla already starting to exhibit signs of paranoia, principally due to Edison who by this point has graduated from rival to nemesis. When the film ended, I sat through the end credits. “David Bowie!” I exclaimed, turning to my wife. “That was David Bowie playing Tesla!” Bowie’s given good – sometimes inspired – performances in movies before, most notably Nic Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. His turn in ‘The Prestige’ is something else, though. I honestly didn’t recognise him on that first viewing; he had become the character.

‘The Prestige’ is a dark story of blame, grudges, guilt, secrets and sacrifices. One of the magicians, in the final stretch, emerges as slightly more sympathetic than the other. Throughout the rest of the movie, though, it’s left to the supporting characters to supply the humanity: Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as the women in the feuding conjurors’ lives and, particularly, Michael Caine as the impresario whose association with them goes right back to the beginning of the story.

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla contributes something else entirely. He brings real gravitas to his portrayal of Tesla and, in turn, Tesla lends a crazed credulity to the single most fantastical element of the film. The only actual historical character in the film, he’s also the erratic genius who delivers into Angier’s hands a device that utterly changes what he can accomplish in his stage act. The story goes into such brilliantly bizarre realms at this point that no-one else but Tesla could have served the narrative. Put simply, you couldn’t make up a character like Tesla. When the fiction is this strange you need the kind of truth that is stranger than fiction. Watch ‘The Prestige’. Think about what Tesla’s invention does. Don’t ask yourself why anyone could actually believe that such a thing would work. Ask instead if Nikola Tesla would even believe it wouldn’t.

*For the record, I’ve not seen ‘Inception’ yet.