BEFORE: I was late posting yesterday because I went to a beer festival, Beer4Beasts, which raises money for animal charities. I love drinking even better when it's for a good cause. The food at the event was all vegetarian, because serving meat would seem a little out of step with the cause - but it all tasted so good I hardly noticed that I went for a whole day without eating meat. Not that I do this a lot, but once in a while it can't hurt.
Christian Bale carries over from "American Hustle", going from a role where he had to gain a lot of weight to a role where he had to lose a lot of weight.
AFTER: This is one of those slow-build films, like "Requiem for a Dream", where things start to get weird and then progressively worse and worse, or at least that's the feeling. Same cardinal sin as last night, the film starts off with a "shocking" scene and then jumps back to the past to build back up to it.
There are two hard-to-believe premises here, the first is that someone could go for a year without sleeping. I could maybe go a day-and-a-half, when I travel to San Diego I usually don't sleep between a Tuesday morning and a Wednesday night, but I try to doze on the plane, and grab a two-hour nap when I reach my hotel. I have to believe that if I tried to go a week without sleep, at some point my body would just pass out and shut down.
This is especially hard to swallow when you realize the main character here works in a factory, so there's some labor involved in his routine, plus he's seen drinking coffee, so at some point either his work would exhaust him, or that caffeine train is going to run out of steam. What's amazing is that it's a full year before his work is affected in any way.
But let's assume for a second that it's possible, a year without sleep. What's causing this? Why does he suddenly feel that his sanity is going, that he's starting to see people who aren't there, or getting messages from himself that he doesn't remember writing? Eventually we come to realize that either someone is messing with him, or he's got a guilty conscience.
Which brings me to the second hard-to-believe premise, that someone can do something bad and then forget about it, or make themselves forget about it. Let's say he stole something from a store - he might think that was no big deal, but he wouldn't necessarily un-remember it. Look at "Les Miserables" - Jean Valjean is never able to forget his crime, and not just because Javert's always in his face about it, but he won't let himself forget about it, long past the point of reason.
But I suppose if a person does something really terrible they might try to deny it, in which case it would be the job of their subconscious to remind them of it. Even still, I don't know if those reminders would take the form of hallucinations, or manifest themselves in the form of non-existent people, or cause a lack of sleep and appetite to this degree. Assuming that's what is really taking place here, which quite honestly is all still a bit unclear.
Also starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (last seen in "Miami Blues"), Altana Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside, John Sharian, Anna Massey, Reg E. Cathey.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Post-It notes
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