Reconsidering Brad Anderson
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by guest and 88 NAMES and LOVECRAFT COUNTRY author, Matt Ruff, and is a follow-up to this week’s episode on director Brad Anderson’s SESSION 9. In this Afterthoughts, Matt engages his feelings on the rest of Brad Anderson’s ouvre. Enjoy, then, this latest entry in the new chapter of The Fear of God…
As I mentioned on the podcast, my only real complaint about Session 9 is that it so impressed me on my first viewing that I assumed I’d like all of director Brad Anderson’s other films as well. But while I did enjoy Next Stop Wonderland, a romantic comedy he made in the late ’90s, his next two horror films—The Machinist and The Vanishing on 7th Street—didn’t work nearly as well for me.
Hope Davis in Next Stop Wonderland (1998).
It had been a long time since I’d seen them, though, and after having so much fun chatting with Reed and Nathan about Session 9, I decided to go back and give them another look, and check out a couple of other Anderson films that I hadn’t seen yet.
Before I get into specifics, a few general comments: the guy is clearly a talented director. All of the films are beautifully shot and composed, and all feature solid performances by great casts.
When they fall short for me, it’s in the storytelling—but even The Vanishing on 7th Street, easily the weakest of the bunch, is what I’d call an interesting failure. It doesn’t work, but I can still get really engaged thinking about why it doesn’t work, and what I might have done differently with the same story premise. You won’t find me playing that game with one of Uwe Boll’s movies.
Anderson’s follow-up to Session 9 was The Machinist, which stars Christian Bale as a lathe operator named Trevor Reznick who is suffering from a year-long bout of insomnia. (To prepare for the role, Bale undertook a radical fast, dropping sixty pounds and transforming himself into a gaunt skeleton.) During a smoking break, Trevor meets a new coworker, Ivan, who claims to be replacing a welder, Reynolds, who was “picked up by the feds on an old warrant.” Not long afterwards, Trevor is helping another coworker (Michael Ironside) adjust a milling machine when Ivan distracts him, triggering an accident that costs Ironside’s character an arm. Called before a review board to explain what happened, Trevor learns that there is no new welder named Ivan; Reynolds, who was never arrested, is still on the job.
Trevor’s increasingly desperate quest to prove that Ivan exists ends up alienating the few people who haven’t already turned on him. Adding to his sense of paranoia is a series of Post-it notes that appear on his refrigerator, depicting a hangman game in progress with a six-letter word that slowly fills in as he gets closer to the truth.
Christian Bale in the Machinist (2004)
Rewatching The Machinist, I was struck by what a good movie it is, much better than I remembered. At the same time, I understood why I’d underestimated it the first time around: if you’ve seen Session 9, it’s easy to guess the cause of Trevor’s insomnia and to figure out what the six-letter word is. And while the guilt-induced arc of paranoia plays out very differently for the most part, there are a couple of story beats—most notably, Trevor’s final confrontation with Ivan—that feel as though they were lifted directly from the earlier film.
Another issue is that because we meet Trevor after he’s already begun his descent into madness, he’s a harder protagonist to empathize with. I cared about what happened to him, but I didn’t really feel for him the way I felt for Gordon in Session 9. Which is ironic, because ultimately Trevor is a better person: his sin stems from carelessness rather than rage, and his story ends in confession rather than slaughter.
The Vanishing on 7th Street is, as I’ve said, an interesting failure. The story, set in Detroit, opens with a blackout that acts as a kind of rapture for anyone caught without an independent light source: the darkness devours people, leaving behind their clothes and other personal effects. A handful of survivors who were lucky enough to be holding flashlights or standing near open flames when the blackout hit converge on a 7th Street bar that has a gas-powered generator in its basement. The bar offers only temporary refuge—not only is the gasoline supply limited, but the laws of physics seem to be breaking down, causing batteries to drain much faster than they should. And the sunrise is several hours overdue.
It’s an intriguing premise, but the movie can’t decide what to do with it.
A scene in which the protagonists argue about what’s really going on plays like a parody of a writers’ room pitch session: Is it the rapture? Is God rebooting the universe? Is the darkness heaven, or hell, or simply death? Were the survivors spared for a reason? Any of these questions could serve as the basis for a compelling story—but you have to pick one.
Notwithstanding this frustrating indecisiveness, The Vanishing does deliver a few good scares and set pieces. My favorite sequence ends with John Leguizamo literally raging against the dying of the light, defiantly chanting “I exist” as the darkness closes in on him. It’s a moment that feels like the seed of a film I could have loved.
In between The Machinist and The Vanishing, Anderson made another movie called Transsiberian. It’s a thriller rather than a horror film, but the kind of thriller that Hitchcock was known for. And like Session 9 and Next Stop Wonderland, it’s a film that Anderson wrote as well as directed.
The movie stars Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson as a Christian couple who’ve just completed a humanitarian mission in Beijing. Rather than fly home directly, they decide to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow. Their first day on the train, they are sitting in the dining car when a Chinese soldier comes through with a drug-sniffing dog. One of their fellow passengers warns them that the only thing worse than getting arrested in China is getting arrested in Russia.
Not long afterwards, they meet another couple, Carlos and Amy (Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara), who, while friendly, seem like the kind of people who are likely to get in trouble with the police—and likely to get you in trouble with the police, if you are foolish enough to hang out with them.
Naturally, Emily and Woody decide to hang out with them. During a stopover, Emily, who is feeling nostalgic for her youthful days as an unsaved bad girl, takes a walk in the woods with Carlos and returns with a very guilty conscience. Back on the train, she discovers that Carlos, who is of course a drug smuggler, has hidden several kilos of heroin in her luggage. The tension ratchets up further with the appearance of a Russian narcotics detective played by Ben Kingsley.
This film definitely works. When I first started watching, I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for the kind of thriller I assumed it would be.
But by the time I got to the final act, I was completely won over by the strength of the storytelling.
Which brings me to Stonehearst Asylum, which may end up edging out Session 9 as my favorite Brad Anderson film.
Loosely based on an Edgar Allen Poe story (“The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”), the movie stars Jim Sturgess as Edward Newgate, an Oxford-educated psychiatrist who travels to an asylum in a remote part of Scotland to complete his training. As the asylum’s creepy groundskeeper (David Thewlis) explains, Stonehearst caters exclusively to members of the aristocracy: “We have lords, dukes, we even have a cousin of the Queen… We have a viscount who’s convinced he has two heads and an earl who thinks he’s a teapot.”
Ben Kingsley plays the asylum’s superintendent, Silas Lamb, who has some decidedly unorthodox ideas about treatment. Rather than drug his patients or keep them confined, he allows all but the most dangerous inmates free run of the grounds, and indulges their delusions. When Newgate asks whether it wouldn’t be better to try to cure them, Lamb replies, “There’s no cure for the human condition, and it’s a foolish physician who tries.”
Later that night, Newgate follows a mysterious knocking in the heating pipes down to the boiler room and discovers the real superintendent, Benjamin Salt (Michael Caine), locked up with the surviving members of his staff. Lamb is an imposter, Salt explains, a former military surgeon who was committed after he murdered five soldiers. Unhappy with his treatment at Stonehearst, Lamb led the other patients in a revolt, drugging the staff and killing some of them in the process. Now the lunatics are running the asylum.
Salt urges Newgate to go for help. But it’s a long way to the nearest town, and the escape is complicated by Newgate’s infatuation with one of the female patients, Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), a baronet’s wife who was sent to Stonehearst after she violently resisted her husband’s sexual advances. Newgate believes that Eliza is sane, and doesn’t want to leave without her.
And there’s a further complication, which sets up the film’s central dilemma: Lamb may be a murderer, but his ability to empathize with his fellow lunatics makes him a better psychiatrist, in some ways, than Salt ever was. Salt, we soon learn, is a sadistic monster who believes in breaking down his patients through torture in order to cure them. His unsuccessful attempt to break Lamb is what led to the revolt. And while Lamb is too dangerous to leave in charge, restoring Salt to power would only exchange one evil for another.
From a storytelling perspective, the obvious solution would be to put Newgate in charge. But the film undercuts this by being smart enough to recognize that Newgate’s feelings for Eliza are completely unprofessional. He seems well-intended, but it’s possible that he’s just another species of bad doctor.
Kate Beckinsale and Sophie Kennedy Clark in Stonehearst Asylum (2014).
To say any more would be spoiling things. But if Session 9 sounds too grim for your tastes, you might want to give Stonehearst Asylum a try. The movie goes to some dark places, but its vision of humanity is ultimately an optimistic one.
Let me close by saying how grateful I am to Reed and Nathan for inspiring me to reconsider Brad Anderson’s work. There are some other Anderson films I haven’t gotten to yet, and still more coming in the future—according to his Imdb listing, Anderson is currently in development on a film starring Peter Dinklage as “a Machiavellian dwarf [who] brings the kingdom to the brink of ruin by manipulating the prince he serves.” Sounds like my kind of movie.
