Preview
THE MACHINIST
Starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michael Ironside
Directed by Brad Anderson
Opens Friday, December 3
Plaza Theatre
By and large, it’s an actor gaining weight for a role that gets attention. It’s just seen as so dang gutsy for a movie star, in the town where Cher once famously argued that no one could ever be too thin.
Renée Zellweger is called courageous and committed to her craft for putting on the pudding for the Bridget Jones sequel. Robert De Niro, perhaps most famously, gained believability as an aging Jake LaMotta, getting thicker as he grew older in Raging Bull. It even works in documentary – Morgan Spurlock pulled off a stunt of Michael Moore proportions when he put on 30 pounds in his anti-fast-food tale, Super Size Me.
Given this, it’s even more jarring to watch as the stunning and talented Christian Bale peels off some clothing in The Machinist, his latest film. Underneath his shirt, we see what seems to be very little holding skin to bone. Indeed, to commit to screenwriter Scott Kosar’s disturbing script – with nods to literary masters Kafka and Dostoevsky, among others – Bale went on a gruelling diet of no more than a tin of tuna and an apple a day. The actor lost a third of his weight – dropping from 190 to 130 pounds – giving him a creepy skeletal quality. Some have already charged Bale and the film with using this bit of near-starvation as a visual stunt, saying it evokes images of genocide and thus somehow enters the realm of the exploitative and unethical. In particular, Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum has condemned the film as a bad play on genocidal episodes that should not be used for entertainment’s sake.
Not so, says the director behind The Machinist, the New York-based Brad Anderson (Session 9). "Christian’s performance is so much more than just his weight loss," contends Anderson. "On the one hand, it’s not just a stunt. On the other, we did want his appearance to be shocking. The script does call for the character to be like a walking skeleton and Christian was responding to that. From the moment you see him on screen, the audience knows something terrible has happened. But in terms of the experience for him, Christian actually described being that thin as euphoric. He didn’t have a lot of energy, but he said he was in a Zen-like state while on the set."
Anderson adds that if anything, Bale’s post-Machinist weight gain, of about 60 pounds in three months, was probably more dangerous – but the actor had to beef up for his leading turn in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight prequel, Batman Begins. (Bale’s weight loss, while impressive, has also effectively eclipsed the work of The Machinist’s uniformly-talented cast, including the ever-excellent Jennifer Jason Leigh as a love interest.)
Audiences certainly won’t find themselves in a Zen-like mood while sitting through The Machinist. In the movie, Bale plays a factory worker who is racked with paranoia about the people around him. In true Russian-novel form, his suspicions about his co-workers, lovers and landlady grow, with dire consequences. It’s a terrifically dark descent into madness, and one can see Bale throwing himself into the role, perhaps a bit too deeply. The Machinist is, without question, the feel-bad movie of the year, a grim anti-Christmas feature that draws us into its bleak-chic universe while repelling us at the same time. To say it’s disturbing is an understatement.
One can see the challenges the screenplay must have presented. What’s intriguing is the way in which both Anderson and Bale rose to those challenges, and met them so artfully.
Anderson captures the coal-black essence of the film magnificently. There are no bright colours, only shadowy hues of brown and grey. "I didn’t want to hold back," he says. "It’s about pathological characters, after all. It’s not a typical horror movie, in that it really doesn’t conform to the genre rules. And though some have called it a thriller, I don’t think it’s that, either. So many horror movies now seem to be comedies dressed up with the odd scary bits. I didn’t want to simply shock with the film, but rather build the sense of dread. I thought of films like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, as well as Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. I liked the idea of Christian falling into the slowly growing clutch of paranoia. I also wanted to avoid doing anything trendy with the movie. I didn’t want Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack. I didn’t want it to look faddish. I did not want the film to look like Blade. I wanted the film to proceed at a different pace, one that is all its own."
As well as starving all the sex appeal out of Bale, Anderson was also left with the daunting task of making his location, Barcelona, look like industrial-wasteland L.A.
"Yes, this film was about seeking out the uglier side of things," he says. "We were having trouble finding financing in the U.S., but Session 9 had done extremely well in Spain. So a production company wanted to come onboard, but we had to shoot in Barcelona. It’s a beautiful city, full of incredible architecture; but basically, almost anywhere in the world now, all you have to do is drive and you can find industrial ugliness. After that it was just a matter of changing the signs and finding huge gas-guzzling cars like so many people drive in the States. People in Europe just don’t drive around in those big old boats.
"Shooting in Barcelona, though a challenge, gives the film an added dimension," he claims. "We were trying to create America in a foreign place, so there’s a sense of it all being eerily generic, of being placeless, timeless. It was a perfect reflection of a person who is paranoid about his attachment to the world."
And while watching The Machinist, its eerie and often unpleasant mood leads one to conclude that America’s current place in the world was intentionally being reflected.
"I can certainly see how someone might think that while watching the film," Anderson concedes. "But that wasn’t something that was on my mind at the time. Yes, we’re stuck with Bush for four more years. It is grim. You know, when we were shooting in Spain it was right at the beginning of the war on Iraq, and boy, were Americans ever unpopular there. The Spaniards were over 95 per cent against it. So perhaps that did seep into our mentality while we were shooting. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility."
Acting to the extreme
What would you do to get a job? Dropping 60 pounds to take on the title role in The Machinist, Christian Bale’s physical transformation is certainly impressive (if not alarming). But as it turns out, he is only the most recent performer to go the distance for a part. Hollywood has a long history of actors changing their physical appearance to take on a role.
· Raging Bull and The Untouchables: In the most famous case of Hollywood body sculpting, Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds for the role of aging boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Seven years later, De Niro bulked up again to portray Chicago crime boss Al Capone in The Untouchables. Rumour has it that he had his hairline modified for the part, but it was nothing compared to the haircut he got for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
· Full Metal Jacket: At the same time De Niro packed it on in The Untouchables, a then-unknown Vincent D’Onofrio added a whopping 70 pounds for his career-making turn as Pte. Pyle. He beat DeNiro by 10 pounds, but because this was one of his first roles, people weren’t familiar with his usual dimensions.
· National Velvet: A 12-year-old Liz Taylor fell in love with the character of jockey Velvet Brown, but the studio didn’t want her because they thought she was too small, short and immature for the role. In a display of fortitude not usually seen in pre-teens, Taylor implemented a high-protein and-carbohydrate diet and started hanging upside down to stretch out her spine. She added three inches to her height before production started and landed the role.
· Circle of Friends: Years before the yo-yo diet regimen of Renée Zellweger, Minnie Driver gained 30 pounds to get the part of Bennie in Circle of Friends. She then dropped the weight to fulfil her dream of dancing naked in the title sequence of a James Bond film, Goldeneye.
· Best in Show: Parker Posey actually got braces on her teeth to take on the role of a catalogue-loving yuppie in this dog-show mockumentary.
· Other famous changes: Harrison Ford slimmed down for The Mosquito Coast because the studio told him he looked too chunky in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Linda Hamilton and Demi Moore both hit the gym to get ripped for their parts in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and G.I. Jane, respectively. Morgan Spurlock gained 25 pounds (in 30 days) for Super Size Me, Ralph Feinnes added 25 pounds for Schindler’s List, Adrian Brody lost 30 pounds for The Pianist, Charlize Theron gained 30 for Monster, Benecio Del Toro put on 40 for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tom Hanks dropped 50 for Cast Away. |
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