The Actor

14

Ironically, a movie about a man with amnesia left very little impression on me. To the point I kind of forgot the thing five minutes after it ended. The etherial and dreamy quality of a POV from a dude with a serious head injury makes for a surreal experience that fits right in with other meta-upon-meta stories dreamt up by the film’s executive producer, Charlie Kaufman. And directed by his co-directing collaborator on Anomalisa, Duke Johnson. It certainly feels like Kaufman’s influence is all over this thing, but comes across as a junior varsity version of his general vision. Granted, the screenplay was adapted from a pre-existing novel by Donald E. Westlake, but Johnson clearly put his stamp on it in an intentional and specific way. Perhaps after reading Kaufman’s own novel, Antkind, which itself features a character lost inside his own head.

Amnesia. It’s a trope as old as time. What could build more mystery than a character trying to figure out who the heck he is? Or, in this case, an actor trying to find his character. Because, of course, the meta value here is that the dude who loses his memory (both long and short-term) is a man who inhabits characters for a living. Played by a man, André Holland, who, obviously, is himself an actor who is playing a role whose character isn’t exactly clear. Which may or may not explain how a black man in 1950s America in small-town Ohio somehow never gets even a sideways glance for being black. It’s noticeably odd. The Internet tells me Ryan Gosling was initially considered for this role, which would have eliminated that layer of surreality, but my thought is they just never rewrote anything in the screenplay to consider the race of their main character in the midst of a time where segregation and discrimination probably would come into play. I kept waiting for it to come up, but somehow Holland walks through the whole film without that particular issue. Maybe there’s some deeper commentary there about actors inhabiting their characters, but I think it’s just something Johnson decided he didn’t want to address with all the other things going on.

Holland’s character, Paul Cole, is a NYC stage and television actor who, for some reason, is putting on a play with his acting troupe in this tiny town in the middle of Ohio. He hooks up with a local woman after the show, brings her back to his hotel room and is interrupted by her husband, who busts in and whacks him over the head with a chair. He wakes up in the hospital the next day with amnesia, not remembering who or where he is. Through some clues he learns he’s from NYC, but only has enough bus fare to get him to another small town in Ohio from which he can catch a bus to NYC. He gets a job in a tannery where he plans to earn just enough to get him back to NYC. This is all told in an aesthetic akin to an episode of The Honeymooners. There’s an artifice to the backdrops. Everything kind of looks like a set. And, as the audience, we’re asked to both interpret this as this netherworld that Paul is living in between his life on stage and his current reality and pretend what our eyes are seeing is reality. A sort of suspension of disbelief where our brains gloss over the obvious unreality of things and make what is clearly not real real. All of which is helped along by Johnson’s very soft-focus and smokey sets. As if everything is happening in a memory or what would stereotypically be what you’d picture as a dream. It’s a little heavy-handed and definitely added to my disconnection with parts of the film.

After listening to an interview with Johnson, it sounds like some of the choices made in the film were more serendipitous than planned. One of the more ambiguous, but seemingly intentional ideas, was using the same actors to play multiple parts across the film. Presumably members of Paul’s original acting troupe, people like Toby Jones show up throughout the film as a cop and co-worker and whatever else. It’s a little disorienting as a viewer, as it’s unclear if we’re supposed to recognize them as the same or different people. It’s especially confusing when a very recognizable Tracey Ullman — who, funny enough, was known for her character work using heavy prosthetics — shows up as a very similar-looking woman in the same town twice. But while this could be seen as another factor in Paul’s mixed up brain, the choice was also practical. The film had a small budget and was shot in Budapest, which limited cast travel and lodging. Thus the vast majority of the very small cast, save Holland, being British (the cost of importing American actors being higher) and necessitating them to play multiple parts to save on cost. A practical decision that Johnson could spin into a positive. Though not without its negatives.

The thing with mysteries is that we can either be ahead of the character or with the character. In this case, we know what’s up with Paul. But Paul doesn’t know what’s up with Paul. We know he’s an actor. We know he has amnesia. We have a general sense of his background and that, as a guy who would sneak off to cuckold another man for a night of fun, he’s probably not the world’s best dude. Thing is, he doesn’t know this about himself. He has flashes, but can’t connect cause and effect to his current situation. Instead, he sees himself through his new relationship with Edna (Gemma Chan), a woman he meets in the small Ohio town he ends up in. A woman who sees him as a kind, hard-working guy. When he coincidently realizes that he is a bigger deal than he knew — ironically uncovered by his new theater-loving girlfriend — and decides he needs to get back to NYC immediately, he starts to see who he truly was. And that person — the real Paul Cole — is not a great guy. Which, again, we already kind of knew, but he only realizes after reconnecting with the people who knew him best. Turns out he’s kind of a selfish prick who apparently makes fun of homeless people? Point is, we’re not surprised by this mystery given the clues we already have about him, but he’s surprised that this nice person Edna reflected back on him is, in reality, kind of a dick.

The film continues in this vein, putting Paul in symbolic situations that test his sense of self. Including landing a role that goes completely sideways given both his short-term memory issues and his cracked sense of self. The mechanics of his amnesia are never really very clear and seem to kind of come and go to fulfill plot points. But in a movie that is really vague around the edges, I suppose the manifestation of his brain damage doesn’t need to be 100% settled science. Johnson does lean into the surreal as the movie goes along, presumably trying to communicate what’s going on in Paul’s psyche, but while I see his approach referred to as Lynchian, it definitely doesn’t have that creepy edge that Lynch’s stuff does. Instead, it’s much more old-school feeling. More along the lines of a It’s a Wonderful Life. Or something more classic and throwback before the sharp paranoia of the 1970s films became a thing. There are even pretty big echoes of another Kaufman film, Synecdoche, New York, in which a character builds his life using actors as stand-ins for people in his real life. This film isn’t even close to as weird as that one, but the influence certainly feels like it’s there. Holland is certainly a dynamic actor, and he commands the screen, but the stilted, stylized nature of the narrative and the gauzy shooting style mutes some of his performance, making it feel more soap opera than prestige. It’s unclear at points if we’re supposed to laugh or be invested in his tortured brain. The script just seemed both over and under-worked. Which is tough to do. There may have been a reason this novel wasn’t submitted for publishing prior to Westlake’s death, and only published after it was found it among his papers. It just doesn’t quite connect all the dots. And neither does its progeny.