A Different Man
Here we are, three weeks into January, and the Sundance Film Festival has delivered what promises to be the year’s most uncomfortable date movie, a grubby New York set fable about a facially distinctive actor (modeled on Adam Pearson) who undergoes an experimental procedure that leaves him looking like Sebastian Stan presumably an improvement, until he realizes that under the skin, he’s still the same miserable loser.
The kind of oddball satire only indie studio A24 would dare to produce, Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” asks what it means to be “normal,” and whether, if we could wave a magic wand and “correct” those same aberrant qualities which set us apart, that’s really something we’d want. “Twilight Zone” level weird at times, “A Different Man” suggests the bizart house version of a Woody Allen movie, wherein traditional jokes have been axed in favor of long, cringe inducing scenes between a nervous shlub named Edward (Stan, disguised to the point of unrecognizability) and the out of his league neighbor on whom he has a crush (Renate Reinsve of “The Worst Person in the World”).
If you’ve seen Schimberg’s previous feature, “Chained for Life,” or Jonathan Glazer’s out there “Under the Skin,” then you’re already familiar with Pearson, a British actor whose unique appearance the result of a condition called neurofibromatosis, incorrectly associated for years with “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick made him just right for a handful of incredibly specific film roles.
Now comes Edward, the character Pearson was born to play. Except Schimberg casts Stan instead, hiding him behind an elaborate mask for much of the film. Makeup pro Mike Marino’s mostly convincing prosthetics replicate many of Pearson’s signature features the asymmetrical brow, swollen lips and loose jowls which inevitably invites the question why Schimberg didn’t simply ask Pearson to play Edward.
“Exactly!” the writer director would surely reply, pleased to see that his thought provoking project has audiences engaging with the kind of issues the looks conscious film industry is still trying to wrap its head around. Here’s one, straight out of Schimberg’s script. “Do you cast someone with a condition even though it’s not the right fit?” And who gets to tell such stories anyway? (Schimberg, for the record, was born with a cleft palate and focuses much of his work on shifting cultural views of such conditions. To his credit, he imbues even the smallest supporting characters with the sense that their lives continue off-screen.)
With “A Different Man,” Schimberg attempts and mostly succeeds, with deliciously awkward results to cram a lifetime of thoughts about beauty and ugliness, attraction and disgust, identity and performance into a postmodern meta film mold that few (apart from Charlie Kaufman, perhaps) have managed to make tolerable. Add to that Schimberg’s Brechtian way of cueing audiences to interrogate his choices as they go (the makeup is deliberately imperfect, the script brazenly self-conscious), and you get an exercise more appealing to film critics and academics than to an amusement-seeking public.
Reinsve and Stan, who were representing two sides of self loathing character Nicolas Cage in “Adaptation” the artist and the muse split into separate personae are here both playwrights struggling to represent someone they’ve deemed a “freak.” You can’t ask the same movie that stuffs two hours (that feel like years, thanks to how Schimberg stretches out discomfort) with as many representation issues as a semester-long seminar to also satisfactorily unpack this one.
At the same time, Reinsve follows up her “Worst Person” performance by playing another nonchalantly alluring young woman who has a knack for destroying what she loves. Shortly after meeting Guy, Ingrid throws herself at the actor (who in every way but the most superficial isn’t a different person than he was before). When they’re in bed together, Ingrid asks Guy to put on the mask it’s like peeling back another layer of an already exposed nerve. There’s some more confusion injected into “A Different Man” as it heads toward the finish line and starts to stretch Stan’s acting chops, nobody could have portrayed the doppelgänger staring him in the face except Pearson.
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