“We don’t want to scare people,” a director says at the beginning of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. It’s the set of a workplace educational film on facial deformities and Edward (Sebastian Stan), an actor with elephant man-like neurofibromatosis, is playing a co-worker in distress whose loud moans of fake pain risk producing genuine discomfort. Dollying in, out, and back in to Edward’s performance — playing it first as semi-real, then as staged, and, finally, as even stagier — the scene announces the film’s conceptual scheme and sets up the first layer of a mise en abyme that will continually reorient, distort, rebuke, ridicule, and redeem our perceptions of reality, artifice, and the relationship between the two.
Edward lives a solitary, reclusive life. He is awkward and shy; perpetually made to feel out of place by the unshakeable notion that everyone is looking at him and treating him differently due to his condition. Strangers seem to untowardly approach him on the street; casting directors shoot him looks of tired disdain; when his new neighbor, Ingrid (a manic pixie dream girl-ish Renate Reinsve) comes over to borrow some laundry detergent, he seems to always mistake her pity for advances. There’s a deep sense of spiritual longing and inner tragedy at play inside Edward in these early scenes, and Schimberg shoots much of this material in long continual dolly shots, reminiscent of Dreyer, that are occasionally punctured by Bava-esque smash zooms which hint at tones of B-movie monstrosity coating the surface of how we see him.
His one hope for relief comes in the form of a strange medical trial that has the potential to completely eliminate his condition and turn him into a different man. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that it does, allowing him to take on a new life filled with casual sex, binge-drinking, and a career as a scummy real estate agent. Faking his own death (and tearing off Sebastian Stan’s layers of prosthetics), Edward has rebranded himself as Guy Moratz and is finally able to live a simpler, seemingly less inhibited life. His former life begins to catch up with him, however, when he chances upon Ingrid as she’s holding auditions for her new play, Edward, which blatantly tells the story of his former life. Donning a mask of his old, pre-surgery face, Guy takes on the role of Edward and seduces Ingrid in the process.
Moving away from the B-movie tinged, absurdist slice-of-life tone of the movie’s first section, Schimberg catapults A Different Man into a dizzying display of dramatic and intellectual pyrotechnics through its second and third acts. The play-within-the-film welcomes all sorts of twists and turns that question, mock, rebuke, and even reconfirm many of the prejudices we’d formed and encountered over the first stretch. As Ingrid’s corny, clichéd play repeats many of the tropes around physical difference the film deployed in the first half, Schimberg highlights the artificiality of those tropes without negating them and problematizes them without condemning them. Questions about representation, about whether Guy can play Edward with a mask, take on not only a meta ring, but a metaphysical one when a mysterious stranger with neurofibromatosis, Oswald (Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis in real life), stumbles into the theater during rehearsal and slowly charms his way first into the part and then into Ingrid’s pants.
Oswald is everything that Edward never was: charismatic, confident, and charming to the ladies. Evoking Poe and Dostoevsky, Oswald forms a negative double of Edward, calling into question everything we’ve taken for granted in our understanding of how his condition has formed his identity. He instantly rebuts the layers of pity we’ve formed around Edward’s genetic condition and the suffering we’ve presumed he’s had to deal with because of it. For if Oswald can slide through life so gracefully, why would we have any right to presume that Edward’s difference has disadvantaged him? Furthermore, is Oswald’s depiction of Edward more ethical or honest than Guy’s portrayal of him? And, on a more self-aware level, what about Pearson’s depiction of Oswald as an affable British gentleman seemingly untouched by his condition versus Romanian-born Stan’s prosthetic-heavy portrayal of Edward as a lonely, anxiety-ridden New Yorker?
Schimberg provokes these sorts of questions so rapidly and ably in the second half of the film that at one point even the characters start shouting them at each other. Yet no matter how well Schimberg tightly twists and turns the drama around one idea after another, constantly hitting at it in a new light or angle, the film’s actual quotient for genuine provocation is relatively low. As much as it makes you think, it does so in the way most Sundance movies in the Trump-era do: by pointing out flaws in your own mental account of various different racial/sexual/abled others without ever actually upsetting, destabilizing, or disturbing you. It’s a satisfying sort of provocation, and while A Different Man is superlative in its ability to constantly tease at the audience’s complacent biases, maybe actually scaring people, prodding them into genuine discomfort, could have been to the film’s benefit.
Luckily, any quibbles with the film are minor, even if they’ll likely remain major talking points in the film’s critical reception, because what’s at the heart of the film isn’t really its identity politics, but a Kafkaesque sense of paranoia. Schimberg has crafted a world where everything seems uniquely geared to punish and ridicule Edward no matter what he looks like. Perhaps he can change his face, but he’ll remain stuck in the same morass of social misery, inferiority, and paranoia. If anything, this also helps put the film against mainstream ideas of social determination based on identitarian categories. Edward’s and Oswald’s fates aren’t predetermined by their genetics or even their economic situation — far from it — but by a nauseating sense of spiritual inevitability that sets out to perpetually punish one and reward the other simply from a Hitchcockian sense of cosmic absurdity.
DIRECTOR: Aaron Schimberg; CAST: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, Miles G. Jackson, Renate Reinsve; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: September 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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