‘The Actor’ Review: André Holland Forgets His Lines in a Slight but Beguiling Amnesia Noir from ‘Anomalisa’ Co-Director Duke Johnson
Co-directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015’s “Anomalisa” told a walking nightmare of a story about a motivational speaker who perceives (almost) everyone he meets to be the same identical stranger. They all share the same face, they all speak with the same voice, and they all reflect the inescapable self-absorption of the main character, whose hell is that he can only see the world through the prism of his own two eyes.
“The Actor” — Johnson’s solo feature debut — is a similarly dream-like film about a man suffering from the exact opposite problem. His name is Paul Cole (a fantastically dispossessed André Holland, mining rich layers of terror from the fear of forgetting one’s role in life), he’s a rising star of the New York stage, and we’re first introduced to him on a dark and fateful night in the fictional town of Jeffords, Ohio, where his theater troupe has just performed their latest show. Paul takes a local gal to his hotel room for a nightcap, which inspires the gal’s husband to take a chair to Paul’s head.
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When our hero wakes up in a hospital bed the next morning, he finds himself afflicted with both retrograde and anterograde amnesias; he doesn’t know who he is, nor does he have the ability to create a new character for himself to play. Paul can see the rest of the world just fine (and in some respects, maybe even more clearly than before), but his hell is that he can only see himself through the eyes of other people.
So begins a spectral and somnambulant little mood piece that lacks the energy needed to galvanize its haziness into something you might be able to hold onto, but still feels vivid enough to hold viewers in its spell. Like any dream worth sharing, it’s familiar enough to recognize where it came from and strange enough not to know where it’s going.
While Kafkaesque amnesia noir is practically a micro-genre unto itself, Johnson’s film — adapted from the Donald Westlake novel “Memory,” which the author wrote in 1963 but kept like a secret until after his death — stands apart because of its abject disinterest in its central mystery. This isn’t a movie about a man trying to piece together the missing fragments of who he is, it’s a movie about a man whose profound inability to do so forces him to confront the idea that identity isn’t something that can ever be found in the first place. On the contrary, it’s something that can only be performed, which proves rather difficult for an actor who suddenly can’t remember any of his lines.
Like that of the protagonist in “Anomalisa,” Paul’s condition is inexorably surreal in nature, and yet at the same time it’s also something that all of us experience to one extent or another during every moment of our waking lives. Johnson is fascinated by how both of those things can be true at once — by the shaky construction of human identity, and how easily it can all collapse upon itself like a house of cards.
Where the Lynchian psycho-comedy of “Anomalisa” reflected that tenuousness through its use of stop-motion animation, “The Actor” does through the shifting fluidity of stagecraft. Cities are made out of painterly miniatures, interior spaces are designed to resemble sets, and the transitions between them are often executed with the theatrical brio of a lighting change; the only locations that feel even glancingly “real” are the interior of the small-town movie theater where Paul first meets a beautiful stranger named Edna (an arrestingly lovestruck Gemma Chan), and the television set where he reports for his first bit part since the incident. The whole film is saturated with an amber glow that forbids you from taking any of it at face value, and — in another echo of “Anomalisa” — almost the entire supporting cast is played by the members of Paul’s theater troupe, who rotate through any number of different roles over the course of this story.
Toby Jones first appears as the Ohio police officer who railroads Paul out of town with an unspoken edge of racial prejudice, and then again only a few minutes later as a loan shark at the tannery where the actor gets a job to help pay his way home (the movie is unstuck in time to some degree, but also clearly set in the mid-century America in which “Memory” was written, before identity was refracted through the digital landscape). “Nosferatu” bird-eater Simon McBurney appears as several different doctors, “Peaky Blinders” star Joe Cole is introduced as Paul’s wannabe jazz musician BFF before body-swapping into a producer of the “Twilight Zone”-esque TV show that encases this movie like a snow globe, and “Sex Education” breakout Tanya Reynolds transforms from a droll factory time-keeper to a venomous New York scenester. The strangers in Paul’s world are so hard to keep straight that it feels like a cheeky joke when the ever-chameleonic Tracey Ullman shows up as a source of comfort (to begin with, anyway).
The only person who stays fixed in Paul’s mind is Edna, whose affection for him raises the possibility that his amnesia might be an opportunity in its own right; that his inability to remember who he is might be the best chance he’ll ever have to become someone else. It’s implied — sometimes more than implied — that Paul wasn’t the nicest guy in the world before his brain injury knocked that guy right out of his head, and losing his sense of self comes with the benefit of losing his preconceptions of other people along with it. Suddenly, Paul is as curious about the world as a good actor should be, and free to improvise where once he could only stick to his own awful script. Was he born to be an actor, or is that just the only part he’s ever bothered to rehearse? Is New York his home, or just where he’s been condemned to think he belongs? What is falling in love if not an unsolicited invitation to rethink everything you know about who you really are?
Cuttingly funny at times, “The Actor” isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty. Slight as a nagging thought and often carried along by nothing but the constancy of Richard Reed Parry’s quavering noir score, Johnson’s solo debut grows darker and more distressing until Paul’s sense of self is made so inextricable from his memories (or lack thereof) that he has no choice but to start over from scratch.
The lingering magic of Johnson’s adaptation is located in how the director — along with co-writer Stephen Cooney — insist upon seeing the positive in the possibility of re-casting oneself, which marks a sharp break from the unalloyed cynicism of Westlake’s novel. “Twenty-five years from now you’ll live in a neighborhood and you’ll go to a job and your kids’ll be growing up, and that’s just the way of it,” Westlake wrote. “The place you live might be here or New York City or San Francisco, but who you are and what you are and what you’ve got to look back on will be all the same thing.” To which Johnson’s film simply adds: Act accordingly.
Grade: B-
NEON will release “The Actor” in select theaters on Friday, March 14.
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