In The Actor, memory pulls at the neck of Paul Cole (André Holland) like a diving tether that threatens to snap at every turn of the head. Cole is a traveling actor who, after being caught in bed with another man’s wife, wakes up in a hospital bed in a strange town with little memory beyond the chair leg flung toward his head that knocked him out. He awakens surrounded by surly cops, an angry, cuckolded husband, and nurses and doctors who bustle through charts and graphs and explain that Paul’s injury has left him with no long-term memory and a short-term memory that’s spotty at best. He knows that New York City is home and that he needs to get back by Christmas, but why — and how, considering his empty pockets — remains a mystery.
The Actor, an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel Memory, is Duke Johnson’s solo directorial debut. But like Cole, Johnson’s history and influences haunt the work like a specter. Johnson cut his teeth as a stop-motion animator under the tutelage of Mr. Show alum Dino Stamatopoulos on projects like Moral Orel and Mary Shelly’s Frankenhole. Those works got popular enough for Charlie Kaufman to eye their production company (Dan Harmon’s Starburns Industries) for 2015’s Anomalisa, a melancholic ode to ennui that Kaufman and Johnson codirected. The two filmmakers would find kindred spirits in one another and proceed to collaborate on 2020’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, another work suffused with Kaufman’s textbook depressive headiness. Kaufman serves as an executive producer on The Actor, which also marks Johnson’s first live-action project, and his hand lies heavily within its text. But where Charlie Kaufman’s cerebral knottiness bursts open with caffeinated slapstick, Johnson suggests a preference for relatively sober melodrama, leaving mysteries cool and unsolved as he sees fit.
Paul returns to consciousness without a dollar to his name, but the drive to return home swims like anima through his unconscious. He takes a job at a nearby tannery to build up a budget to fund his trip back to the city and rents a room he hopes will be temporary. With little more than a notion of what his past life might have been, though, this new job and strange town soon gel into enough of a concrete life to challenge what he may have left behind. That compromised and competing sense of reality is enough to disorient anyone, let alone a man nursing a head injury, and when a woman named Edna (Gemma Chan) catches Paul’s eye at a movie theater before he nods off in his seat, the borders that separate the silver screen, dreams, and waking life become porous.
That tension — between what we experience, what we perceive, and what we imagine — quickly takes priority over the noir-flavored enigma of what may have comprised Paul’s life before the attack. It’s a risky gambit, one certain to alienate the percentage of The Actor’s audience bent on unspooling a cogent narrative from the movie’s tangled ambitions, but the strength of Holland’s performance offers firm footing in the soil from which Johnson’s esoteric tendencies bloom (and, at the very least, a consolation prize for those that remain unamused). The Moonlight actor offers a picture of the sort of beleaguered dreamer that recalls Anthony Hopkins in The Trial, a working man pummeled thoroughly enough by the menace of material reality that all he can manage to hold on to is his own melancholy as the tethers to his sense of normalcy begin to fray.
Like in The Trial, money is somehow untouched by the film’s dissolving realities, and cinematographer Joe Passarelli’s camera is careful to note each dollar that leaves Paul’s hand: at the movies, toward his room and board, and at a bar with his fellow tannery hands, where Paul again encounters Edna and Holland finds a formidable match in Chan. Edna seems attuned to whatever frequency that’s keeping Paul in his dissociative state — during their first dance at the bar, Edna pinches Paul to ensure they’re not dreaming — and they become fast friends in this small, strange town, sharing dinners and dates and watching mid-century dramas with heads on each other’s shoulders. Still, Paul can’t escape the imperative to return to New York. When he scrapes up enough cash, he boards a bus to trade what is now for what may have been then, only to find his home as alienating and unforgiving as his own murky memory.
A title like The Actor is deliberate in its suggestions of performance, and the competition it posits between dreams, movies, and TV, and everyday life finds a gorgeously rendered complement in Johnson’s craft. The movie is shot with the surreal intimacy of a black box theater; sets that feel flimsy and claustrophobic melt away into darkness so that only Paul and Edna exist. That small-stage air is underlined by the movie’s cast — including titans of character acting Toby Jones and Tracey Ullman — who often play upwards of five different roles to complicate further Paul’s allegiance toward notions of what’s real.
The Actor is set in the thick of America’s 20th century, an era Johnson matches with title cards aped from TCM and Vaseline glommed thick on the camera’s lens. Doppelgängers and misplaced memories combine with that vision of the ‘50s — albeit one distinctly divorced from modern American conservatism — to immediately evoke David Lynch. But Johnson invites a welcome sentimentality to his movie that both dulls the late master’s severity and couches The Actor in a greater history of melodrama. In practice, The Actor functions less like Blue Velvet than a Douglas Sirk adaptation of Bertolt Brecht, its ample gauze blurring as much of the boundary between performance and authenticity as it does the edges of its sets and players.
Ultimately, Paul Cole is a man who just wants to come home, and The Actor is most effective in its interrogation of what constitutes that home, whether it’s something that exists independently of who we are or if it’s simply an idea we’ve performed or imagined. Johnson doesn’t seem particularly worried about the answer, or even whether it’s a question that can be answered at all — instead, he’s content to let the dream play out for as long as he can before someone pinches him awake.
DIRECTOR: Duke Johnson; CAST: Andre Holland, Gemma Chan, Toby Jones, Joe Cole; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: March 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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