The first of the many acerbic, dark jokes in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man that I noted was of a woman peering with mild disgust at Edward, a character with prominent facial tumors, whilst holding a copy of The Bluest Eye. The novel is Toni Morrison’s first published work and centers around a young Black girl named Pecola who convinces herself that having blue eyes will grant her enlightenment and love. It’s through this kind of detail in A Different Man, underlined again later in the film when two other characters express their love for the book, that Schimberg welcomes comparisons, discourse, and a constant stream of mental annotations on this layered film. The trajectory of Edward and Pecola, the rabbit-hole ruses of Schimberg and Charlie Kaufman, the constant conflict of actors born to play the role and actors who transform to play the role. But whether you choose to appreciate, laugh, or roll your eyes at the joke, there’s no doubt that Schimberg keeps ’em coming with psychological punchlines once the first one is uncovered, showing us how dark a comedy can get when the dial is turned to the pitch-black abyss.
Edward, played by Sebastian Stan, is an aspiring actor who finds himself in roles befitting his condition of neurofibromatosis. In the beginning, he carries himself with invisible borders from the world to create physical and emotional distance. We can presume that this separation is the result of experience or his preemptive reaction to how people perceive him. In the beginning of the film, he develops a friendship with his new neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), an aspiring playwright who seems to encroach onto his presence with little hesitation, but their romantic endeavors stop short of potential embarrassment.
His life changes when he volunteers for a clinical trial that’ll examine the off-label indication of a medication originally intended for alopecia. In an alarmingly grotesque, fresh off the Cronenberg-flesh effect, the medication succeeds in melting Edward’s face to Stan’s sculpted movie-star profile (understandably, you might need to recall the days of Bucky Barnes and not Stan’s recent transformations). Recognizing that he’s unrecognizable even by the scientists behind the trial, Edward decides to “kill” off Edward and start a new life as Guy, who becomes a prominent real estate agent with a nicer apartment.
I could go on about the plot, which makes enough paragraphs for its own essay. But the deductions behind the story are about Edward’s psyche, which never leaves him even when he becomes Guy. When Edward/Guy realizes that his facial tumors are gone, he first sits at a bar and is immediately enveloped by a group of celebrating sports bros who clink glasses with him without a second thought, not minding the fact that Edward is the type of man who tucks his plaid shirts into khakis and folds his torso over even though he is not clinically hunchbacked.
The impact of Edward’s physical metamorphosis on his confidence and (many) insecurities is what makes Stan’s performance in A Different Man a fascinating role. He has to navigate the spaces that had previously felt prohibited, to which we try to guess whether it was self-imposed in the first place. Various stories of traversing identities, from White Chicks to Sorry to Bother You to your average story about a closeted person, explore the different treatments among race and sexuality and A Different Man is not that different. But Stan holds fast to this character who used to look like Edward but now looks like Guy/Stan, so when his insecurities lash out at everyone else who is none the wiser about his past, it is a cruel joke shared between him and us. Even the greatest actors might keep us wondering if they will forget to act with such stratification, but Stan keeps his character(s?) in lock.
The film embeds in an environment that feels timeless in storytelling and opportune in topical events. Something about the mind-ya-business attitude of New York makes for the perfect backdrop for the characters to function as they do. DP Wyatt Garfield upgrades from his portfolio of sinister shadows, dreadful zooming, and projection lights in 2022’s Resurrection into a film that operates like it’s from a different decade. Corners of the room elongate like a ‘50s murder mystery and Ingrid speaks with a rhythm not unlike a leading screwball lady, all of which reminds me of some lost-footage fable of a burdened man who still can lose it all.
The last bit of the plot that I need to share, which comes at the mark of the third act, is that Edward/Guy encounters Oswald, who is played by Adam Pearson. At this point of the film, their meeting almost seems like a hallucination, but for those who have a keen memory will recognize Pearson from 2013’s Under the Skin and will likely already know that Pearson is the real-life Edward — except not. Oswald is the generous and suave character that Edward seems to think wasn’t possible, and yet Oswald’s successes become Edward’s downfall. I have seen some great first on-screen performances this year where I might have used the words “unique” and “one-of-a-kind”, but Pearson’s sharp charm in contrast to Edward’s schmucky jealousy is a perfect performance of duality.
This, along with mostly everything that happens after Edward’s “death,” becomes so metatextual that I could imagine this being the factor that turns people off from the movie. Characters don’t break the fourth wall quite as obvious as Zia Anger’s My First Film, but the film gets so close to the precipice that by the time that Dinner Scene happens, you might either groan or cheer, depending on how your ride’s been so far. The film could only take the labyrinth so far, but it stops where it needs to, dryly reminding us that in the center of ourselves, it’s self-love that keeps the engine going — even if our bodies remember the scars of insecurity.
A Different Man
2024
dir. Aaron Schimberg
112 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, and AMC Assembly Row and Boston Common
