Christian Bale (from Batman Begins) plays Trevor Resnick, an emaciated insomniac who's going through some serious mental issues. The movie follows him as he seems to come undone right in front of our eyes.
The movie has a dark, dirty, danky quality to it that literally made me feel ill. Every edge of this movie is filthy, disgusting.
Bale's performance is incredible. He literally lost enough weight to look like a walking skeleton (63 lbs. reportedly). The scenes showing Bale shirtless are almost unwatchable, like looking at footage from Dachau or Aushwitz. He's beat up, physically and psychologically.
The Machinist is hard to watch. Seeing someone slowly kill themselves is tortuous. I imagine that the director must have been torn ethically making this film because Bale is probably near death making this picture, he's that skinny. What he's done to his body exceeds Tom Hank's transformation in Castaway, Robert Deniro bulking up in Raging Bull, and Matt Damon's AIDS victim in Courage Under Fire.
The Machinist is worth watching because it is about more than just being about one man dying from starvation. It confronts the notion of guilt; dealing with mistakes of the past, and learning to move forward with life. It's about closure.
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