The Poppies of Terra #40 - How Am I Not Myself?

How to snag that dream role? How about that dream life? Must these dreams possess a certain ineluctable intensity to metamorphose into reality, or are their emotional realities fundamentally incompatible with the realities of their actual attainment? In A Different Man, the new film directed and written by Aaron Schimberg (Go Down Death, Chained for Life), Edward is a minor actor who lives a reclusive life in a small New York apartment and tends to let things, like a ceiling leak, get worse before trying to make them better. Edward suffers from neurofibromatosis, but it’s what’s going on inside that seems to hold him at a remove from life’s riches, material or emotional. One day Edward signs up for an experimental medical procedure that ends up sculpting him a new, ruggedly handsome face. He changes apartments, begins working in real estate, where his new killer looks turn out to be quite the asset, while continuing to pursue his thespian ambitions on the down-low.

The theatrical production he becomes involved with, at least theoretically, plays to his strengths. After all, it has been written by Ingrid, a writer who was, pre-procedure, Edward’s neighbor and sometime confidante. Ingrid authored her play inspired by Edward’s real-life story, and though now he goes by the name of Guy Moratz and she doesn’t realize it’s him, Edward, the very subject of her work, he seems to have an uncanny grasp on its emotional core. Or does he? While tentatively pursuing a romantic relationship with Ingrid, Edward seems to have trouble holding on to the role he appears destined to play. Enter Oswald, a fellow sufferer of neurofibromatosis, who has undergone no medical intervention, and yet exudes confidence in his own skin. At first Oswald is merely an observer of the play’s rehearsals, but little by little, his sensitive and insightful suggestions win favor with Ingrid, and the play begins to change. As Oswald takes more of the spotlight, all manner of psychic shadows encroach on Edward. Is he a changed man? Who was he when he looked more like Oswald, and who is he now? Does he covet what others appear to have, or something he feels he might have always been missing within? How clearly can others see you, when your own vision is impaired?

Schimberg writes, directs and stages A Different Man with the sardonicism of an early Woody Allen black comedy infused with the character authenticity of a Noah Baumbach production. Ultimately, he tilts it sideways, in the vein of a Charlie Kaufman trip, only for us to realize that we were the ones looking at things askew all along. We should mention The Elephant Man (David Lynch) in the room, and likewise note Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as partial thematic and aesthetic precursors. The final act brought to mind Edmond, the spiraling Stuart Gordon-directed film starring William H. Macy, based on a 1982 play by David Mamet and scripted by him. And the stage itself may boast the granddaddy of inner-life-vs-outer-appearance narratives in Edmond Rostand’s famous Cyrano de Bergerac.

The movie’s production design by Anna Kathleen and art direction by Emilia Spirito expertly bring home each character’s reality, which often contains at least one overt element of absurdity when entered by a different character. Wyatt Garfield’s (Beatriz at Dinner, Resurrection) cinematography makes interiors suitably claustrophobic, but also opens up the expressive possibilities of every locale. Umberto Smerilli’s smoky, urbane, almost dirge-like score, at times reminiscent of Jon Brion in a Synecdoche, New York state of mind, provides a haunting throughline.The movie, shot in a mere twenty-two days, benefits from its use of 16 mm film and its ensuing graininess.

The three lead performances are all involving, singularly and in combination: Sebastian Stan, as Edward, delivers a career highpoint, masterfully establishing a continuity of lilting body movements and halting speech patterns from the initial incarnation of him we meet, under heavy prosthetics, to the eventual version burdened only by his inner distortions; Adam Pearson is irrepressibly suave and seductive as Oswald, while still somehow demonstrating vulnerability and even a desire to poke fun at his own charm; Renate Reinsve as Ingrid effectively acts as both lure and foil to her costars, and demonstrates an expert knack for comedic timing while simultaneously selling her earnestness as an artist.

The screenplay acknowledges whatever ethical quandaries viewers might have related to visual representations–and potential usurpations–of disability. The quick and playful dialogue is usually several steps ahead of such queries, wisely enlisting them as starting points for deeper, more offbeat contemplations rather than as ends unto themselves. There are also a number of telling references peppered throughout, as for instance to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which traffics in themes such as internalized self-disgust and the destructive pursuit of external beauty ideals that parallel some of the movie’s brush strokes.

John Updike famously said, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” How corrosive is it to place our self-worth in the estimation of others? Does not changing, when putatively aspiring to the opposite, provide its own perverse pleasure? To paraphrase I Heart Huckabees, how is Edward not himself? When the face becomes its own mask, what does it eat into?