Yet the novel manages to draw great wit and energy from its wasted souls.
No one seems to have a steady job, and there's no shaking the sense of wasted souls in a forsaken sector of society.
Myself, too, in a poor man's hut do dwell, wasting my soul with grief, an exile from my father's halls, here by the scarred hill-side; while my mother is wedded to a new husband in a marriage stained by blood.
It might be satisfying for counter-culture types to blow off steam by rebelling against a mega-corporation that markets itself as the hip vanguard of the communications revolution to mask its true establishment-promoting, privacy-invading, addiction-triggering, time-wasting, soul-destroying self.
And a lot of burnouts on the beach, the kids blasted on drugs, the tramps wasted on wine, the solitary souls looking at the sea, and all the other layoffs from the reality factory that find their way there.
What about the notorious "bread and water" diet for poor souls wasting away in dungeons and prisons?
Few actors of Bale's generation are better at breathing life and layers into troubled interior characters, whether the tortured soul literally wasting away before us in "The Machinist," or the black armor of Batman's solitude in "The Dark Knight". His strengths do not serve him, or the movie, as well here.
Extreme age and debility, patients so sick, old, demented, weak, that if families had to pay one-tenth the cost of keeping the poor souls alive, they would instantly see that it was money wasted".
Because this prizefighter has the soul of a mime, every gesture had a pointed expressive purpose; not a twitch was wasted.
