Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Guilt. That’s what this film is about. Maybe you shoulnd’t know that going in but if you’ve read the prior review of it on this site by the very astute moviephile Brandonicus, you already know that. The lead character says at one point in what is either a snippet of a waking dream or a psychotic episode, “A little guilt goes a long way.” And it goes for Trevor Reznick. Plus you get at least 2 Dostoyevsky references. I’m sure other reviews mention it as well so there you have it. Do with it what you may. Reznick does alot.

But why is he so messed up. We get little hints that he was a pretty decent guy who got along with coworkers, drove a cool car, and does ok with the ladies. But now his workmates hate him, he drives a crappy pick up, and his woman is a hooker. Figuring out what’s up with Trevor Reznick is part of the viewing process as you enter into his world of sleep deprivation and minimal food consumption. Something’s not right in the world of a guy, who after a year without sleep, operates heavy machinery for a living. Clearly the guy’s got to be a bit on the drowsy side. Every prescription warning label is all about not combining that quality with that activity. But Trevor continues to operate even as his coworkers notice his strange deterioration into a burnt out stick figure.

Much is made of Christian Bale’s weight loss for this film and it is amazing, creepy, and scary, all at once. He strikes a pose at one point for his heart of gold call girl Stevie, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, that is meant to recall Concentration Camp victims. It fits since clearly this guy is on the Krakow diet plan. Problem is his is a self imposed prison that has him wondering who’s out to get him and why. A strange new coworker shows up that no one will acknowledge, pictures and post-its are found where they shouldn’t be, the latter with cryptic messages including a game of Hangman hinting at a way out of this nightmare that wont let him go.

But the mystery is not so much as to whether he’s going nuts as it is to why. Both protagonist and viewer embark on stark and gritty tour of his nightmarish dreamscape to get at just what’s eating Trevor Reznick.
Trevor himself is doing precious little eating and at least twice in the film someone says to him, “if you were any thinner you wouldn’t exist.” And he doesn’t. At least not the Trevor he was at another point at least a year prior. His physical form has begun manifesting the inward dessication that has turned him into someone quite possibly trying to become invisible or so insignificant he can quietly slip the bonds of reality without anyone noticing.

It’s this point of view that gives Bale’s sacrifice meaning. Without it it seems like the same movie could have been made without putting it’s lead actor through such dangerous deprivations. If you haven’t seen him in this yet, it’s pretty startling. You’d never know this is the same guy from American Psycho and Batman Begins. He wasn’t required to go to such lengths. The script did call for a skeletal looking guy, but Bale took it to extremes in losing a third of his body weight. Certainly a robust figure would not have worked but I think the idea of him being an insomniac for a year puts us into enough of a clued in mode that something is wrong, he’s on edge, and possibly going mad.

But this is cinema. The visual representation of all this does come across in a more visceral way when you see what this guy looks like. And when you see him as escaping the bonds of reality both physically and emotionally, you clearly get a better sense when you see the emaciated version.

The Machinist has a certain dream like quality that’s effecting me more afterwards than it did during my viewing it last night. That’s probably purposeful. The film is shot at a languid pace and with a sort of bilious green color pallette. It’s like for Reznick, since he cant sleep and dream life is becoming a paranoid nightmare and is losing its color, becoming very washed out. The look reminded me a bit of the colors used when we’re inside The Matrix in that film. There is was meant to convey the green tint of a computer screen, which is not far off from its use here. Inside the Matrix the people playing their roles are really asleep
in a sort of nightmare. Reznick is in a waking nightmare and as out of touch with reality as those serving the machines. Things are given an even more dreary look here with a more grey tone mixed in, a tone that presumably matches Reznick’s mood.

As for the role of machinery in this movie, besides possibly serving the ironic purpose I stated above, maybe all the gears, levers, and gadgets we see moving about and causing two dangerous situations in the movie, are metaphors for those of the brain, which for Trevor are operating under dangerous conditions. The warning about heavy machinery and drugs that induce drowsiness puts me in mind of the usual accompaniment to that warning, which is not to drive. Operating heavy machinery and driving a car both figure into this tale prominently. I won’t say how here. I’ll save that for a longer spoiler filled discussion in the forum for those interested in further discussion.

But is the journey into Reznick’s mind worth taking? As i watched the movie i was on the fence about this. There isn’t alot of mystery to solve. Clearly he’s losing it and the reasons why became mostly apparent to me before it was revealed in the final minutes. The slow pace is not for everyone, but I like atmosphere in a movie and this movie has a nice blend of old time Hollywood psychological thriller pacing and feel along the Hitchcockian mode and a modern arty element. The intense atmosphere revolving around guilt, murder, and mental instabilty definitely draw something from Crime & Punishment, which is playing on a marquee in the movie. There is another ref to The Idiot as well, which may have more to do with nature of his relationship with Stevie. The pace is purposeful and part of the storytelling device. That it is staying with me is a testement to Director Brad Anderson’s attempt to create a dreamlike landscape and a haunted character study. Though there is no happy Hollywood ending there is a note of quiet redemption and victory. I could have used a bit more meat to the plot, but irregardless any movie that manages to get under the skin and stick around for a bit is a worthwhile see and gets my approval.

I’ve just gotten the chance to see this indie film and want to comment on it because some of its messages feel so revelent to me as a summer of pain, loss, and regret comes to an even worse close. This is a review and philosophical discussion since I’m kind of using the film as a launching point into some of what it touches on and more.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu chooses to use a non linear approach to telling a pretty powerful story about 3 interlocking but seperate lives all touched by pain, loss, guilt, and each other. The technique’s relevence is certainly debatable since the movie’s main messages don’t depend on it and the story is pretty powerful enough without any tricks. Borrowing loosely from such films as Pulp Fiction and Momento who play with linearality, Inarritu doesn’t need the approach to suit his story as much as those other two films did. Or perhaps he needed it more because without it the story might just be too morbid and depressing to handle without some novelty and puzzle piecing being done by the audience. Structurally the method is not needed, but emotionally it may say something about the fine distinctions between our choices, as well as those between the seemingly powerful cusp moments of our life and the random prosaic ones that intertwine to complete each other.

Paul’s (Sean Penn), relationship with Christine (Naomi Watts), and Mary start off appearing as one thing that a normal telling would have made less understandable and sympathetic to the audience. Jack (Benicio Del Toro), is a religious convert whose revelations are cast in a new light when the sequences we assume led to it are distorted and what we think made Jack turn to Jesus actually does something else entirely. I think this renders the characters more fully real somehow. It’s as if taking them out of the realm of cause and effect judgment lessens and sympathy grows. How important is all this to the movie though?

Not vital in my opinion, but it did add to my ability to sympathize with the characters own confusion and human tendencies towards remixing our lives through the filters of our pain and need rather than reality. By seeing these events torn from out of a normal linear storytelling progression I felt better able to understand each characters disorientation and feel the inevitability of an ending that nevertheless is not exactly what we bargained for. And that feels a bit like life to me.

Perhaps there is something to be made in how the nature of the relationships and the chronology we assume makes the most sense as we piece the puzzle together, turns on itself and plays with our expectations. We get snatches out of the lives of the 3 key characters played by Watts, Penn, and Del Toro, that, like memories, are played back in that random but pertinent way our own minds recall key times in our life as we try to put together the pieces of who we are and why. We remember a missed opportunity here, a wrong decision there, a painful loss everywhere without neccessarily putting it in temporal order as if we’re remembering our lives like a novel or movie. This film doesn’t go that far back, and in act it’s temporal boundries get shorter and its thematic moments narrower as the film progresses. But when I look back at where I’ve been, why I’m here, and where I may be going, it doesn’t play like a mathematical progression between point a and b. Maybe that’s why Penn is a mathematics teacher who is ultimately and literally without a human heart . But when i try to reconcile all that living, regret, pain, loss etc, it seems like one moment could be easily interchanged with another along the timeline to get the same result.

Is that because of some kind of biological determinism? our we shaped by our childhood’s? The movie isn’t neccessarliy asking those questions, but in it we see 3 characters who seem to be inexorably the same in their patterns before and after some of the fims key events. I’m not sure they are changed, as much as more actualized, in the moments that will come to define them.

The title refers to some somewhat half-assed narration in the film that tells us that when we die we lose 21 grams at the moment of death. What made up that 21 grams is a question the film wants us to ask ourselves. Is it the soul? Our memories? Our pain, regret, anger, hate, guilt, loss, or hope?

All 3 main figures lose so much. They die many deaths and suffer so much misery. I was left to wonder if the nature of their suffering was so great it was impossible to return to any place of hope or brightness. Were they so iredeemably reduced to a place of pure nihilism with the random brutality of life’s meaning-negating tragedies and misfortune, that parts of them died long before their lives ended? Were they shells of humanity stripped bare of all those hopes and aspirations to more? Or were they desolate from the get go and finding their natural paths downward and meeting each other along the way?

There’s a key image from the film that i won’t reveal entirely, but which seems to symbolize a vessel as a junk container without that which it’s designed to hold. Put another way: are we just rusted junkheaps inside without those qualities we call soul to fill them up. It is a state these characters seem to be in as they have lost all connection to deeper meaning due to the enormity of their transgressions and those committed against them. They are shells who exist in form only but whose essence is gone as whatever gave them meaning has been taken away. These people clearly lost something in the process of their lives.

If I contemplate what kind of person I think I’ve been or fear I may become I wonder how much of it is the experiences or just inherent weaknesses that consume from the inside until they are all that’s left. As i watch that reel of my past up until now and get scatalogical glimpses of a rejection in the 10th grade, fights won and lost in years prior to that, the loss of my grandmother at 11, decisions made about different things at vastly different ages that all seem to be about the same thing now, a girl I never asked out in the 8th grade even though…a string of rejection and betrayals by the same woman over 6 years all interspersed, my own failures to foster relationships, the death of one so young and its effect, a job choice not made or ignored, the decision to eat that 2nd Big Mac out of something other than hunger, skipping that class, following numerous paths of least resistance, all of it seems woven into a pattern that could be changed around but still be of a piece.

As I think back on things that have been, is it my memories and all their collective associations with guilt, anger, hate of both internal and external natures, pain, and assorted other emotions that combine to make a thing we call soul? And is any of it something real. Something with weight? Does all this disillusionment take as much away from living as whatever leaves the body at death? Or is it that which leaves the body? If everyone has that same 21 grams it seems the inference is that our personal experiences don’t effect things that much and that whatever leaves is pretty much standard issue for us all. But the film seems to belie that notion featuring characters whose experiences are just a shade outside the norm. Throw in the fact that the assertion the movie makes and the “they,” reported to have made this claim about post mortem weith loss is pretty dubious and mostly discredited, and some of this falls apart, as does much of the movies point with this somewhat forced narration. But forget that for a moment. Literallyanyway.

Does it still not make you wonder how much does just living in a world so seemingly bereft of meaning take from us? Can death take more and if so is it’s weight of a Hummingbird more or less than all those memories?

I think the Director may want us to wonder if it is the memories and all their weight we take on that leaves us at death and that in life that 21 grams feels more like a surfeit of emptiness that engulfs us. Would we be better off if we could release that weight in life? These people are burdened. By the guilt of killing a family, by moving on, by the breakdown of the physical body, by Jesus, and by drugs. Their pain is palpable and if it doesn’t weigh something physically could its spiritual weight be all that’s left of hope and humanity by the time we die and have lost so much? A baby doesn’t weigh alot, but a baby once here and now gone weighs a ton. A lost love’s place in a world where love comes so rarely is enormous, potential squandered in a relatively short lifetime another source of possible attrition. What do these types of events do to our realizations and the way we live our lives?

I remember a teacher in the 7th grade at St Peter’s in Yonkers, N.Y. Miss Harmody as I recall. She called me a romantic and was quick to point out to the class and me that she didn’t mean what everyone thinks of by that word. At least what giggling, horny, pubecent teenagers think of. But what I recall is that she said it with an almost sad and regretful tone as if she was seeing how it would be my undoing. I’ve seen that image of that day alot over my life and more than ever understand her tone. In a world that has failed so miserably to live up to those expectations, and as a person who has failed as well, my 21 grams at the moment i shuffle off the mortal coil may be the cynic that the romantic gave birth to and the extra weight of carrying it around is palpable and unescapable. like Penn’s character who understands the reductionism of mathematics but tries to honor his Tin Man heart by trying to give its more abstract parts to its previous owners wife, how many of us get lost in the darkness and in it try to grope clumsily for a way back to the light only to find out, as Paul does, that we can never get that heart we started with back?

Or maybe the point is that no matter his inability to fix things, heal his or anyone’s pain, that despite all this world takes from us, despite all that our soul’s take on, it remains sweet as chocolate and light as 21 grams as it departs our dessicated shells, which take the brunt of misused, or victimized lives, merely appearing to hold nothing, and gaining its pride in letting go.