I Do Have Limits, At Times

My first attempt to watch The Machinist failed, just now, partly because I didn't want to see Michael Ironsides lose a hand but mostly because I can't bear to watch Christian Bale in this film. Not his performance - it looks typically good - but I physically can't bear to look at him. This is kind of a new thing for me. I'm generally not impressed or persuaded when a critic (professional or otherwise) says of an actor in a movie that they can't take him seriously in the role because, implicitly, it's just too weird to see (e.g.) Keanu Reeves doing Shakespeare or what have you. That's either a failure of the actor's skill or the critic's imagination. But I can't, at least right now, watch The Machinist because Bale's obscene levels of weight loss takes me out of it, makes me uncomfortable, makes me worry about his health, makes me want to not look at anyone that skeletally grotesque. On some level I can't imagine that the point wouldn't have been sufficiently effective had Bale starved himself down to, God, I dunno, 140 lbs.? He's a big guy and at 140 he would've looked pretty fucking thin. Supposedly he got to around 120 and wanted to keep going.

There'd been some comment when Batman Begins came out about how Bale was doing all press related to the movie in the accent he used to play the role, suppressing his own Welsh accent; I thought this was kind of cool since he explained it as a gesture to not try and confuse little kids who might wonder why "Batman" sounded different. But I looked at some of the DVD materials on The Machinist and he's, again, doing an American accent; maybe it's because he wanted to stay in-accent at all times on set, which I guess I can understand, but it ties in with the idea that Bale immerses himself to an almost creepy degree. On the DVD of American Psycho Mary Harron talks about watching Bale eat a chicken breast while arguing on the phone with his personal trainer about the time of their appointment because he needed to run to the store and return a videotape (of, I believe, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and she recalls thinking "My God, he's turned his life into Patrick Bateman's." On the little documentary included with The Machinist Bale says something like "I appreciate immersion, but I'm not going to be stupid about it." This is a moment after the director relates how Bale declined the use of galoshes when he had to run through a working sewage system. Dude.