Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” has a sense of confrontational, ironic humor that suggests the glory days of American indie cinema in the 1990s, while its concern with matters of representation in art are quite contemporary. The result is a blend of ideal worlds: a risky movie, willing to go to authentically dark and human places, that also broaches activist subjects without numbing its audience with platitudes.
Edward (Sebastian Stan) is an aspiring actor in New York City who’s struggling to land roles that don’t pivot exclusively on his facial neurofibromatosis. The sequences that find Edward on the set of a promotional short that is intended for HR purposes, playing a character defined only by his condition, are among the sharpest in the film. Schimberg parodies the bright smugness of corporatized empathy that often feels insincere and condescending, prioritizing our feelings of nobility over the subjects of our largesse.
These scenes bump up against poignant moments that root us in Edward’s humdrum life, yet even they are animated by a droll hum of satire. Anticipating rejection, every micro-movement in Edward’s body suggests an apologia for taking up space, which Schimberg and Stan daringly play for pathos and comedy. While Edward mopes about, sad and unconfident, squandering the interest of his attractive and seemingly thoughtful neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), we in the audience are conditioned to link our insecurities up with Edward’s—tentatively. The volatile humor keeps us on our guard.
Sebastian Stan does not have facial neurofibromatosis, and his casting here consciously stokes the debate over whether actors should play characters with conditions they don’t have. I believe that requiring people to play only what they already are defeats the point of acting. However, if there are gifted actors who encounter the problem of limited roles that Edward is shown to have here, shouldn’t they be considered for parts they may understand better than, say, Stan, no matter how vivid his empathy may be?
Schimberg yokes these familiar questions of appropriation to a startling portrait of self-loathing. Via a medical operation that suggests a magic spell, Edward is cured of his condition and comes to look as Stan does in real life. Emboldened by his handsome new face, Edward ditches the acting and his squalid apartment and becomes a successful real estate agent. He acquaints himself with pleasures of sex, money and everything that America tells us is meant to make a man feel like a real man. There is a haunting scene, early on in Edward’s new phase, where he receives oral sex in a public bathroom and regards himself in a mirror. Schimberg doesn’t overdo it, holding the shot just long enough for us to feel Edward’s pleasure and displacement.
No longer recognizable, Edward tells everyone that he’s dead and starts over and, of course, realizes that the attainment of fantasies means nothing. Discomfort in your own skin is only partially about skin, as there is the larger matter of the mind. Schimberg and Stan invest this realization of futility with deep pain. This is a deeper pain than that driving the whimsical scenes of Edward as a woebegone misfit that foreground his condition over his personal essence. You may find yourself missing original Edward, who allowed you to sentimentalize him based on his condition, trivializing him as a symbol of your own hang-ups. New Edward, coasting on his looks, ironically forces us to reckon with his internal dimensions.
The second half of “A Different Man” brings all these contradictions and neuroses into stark relief when the film essentially rewrites itself as an indictment of its own limitations. Edward re-encounters Ingrid, who is writing a play about his life as she once knew him. Edward, gifted a mask of his original face by his doctors, wears it to an audition and is congratulated by Ingrid for his unique insight into a role that she thought should go to someone who actually has original Edward’s physiognomy.
There’s a tricky joke on cultural identity here that’s worthy of Philip Roth: Edward is conceivably put into a situation in which it isn’t politically correct for him to play himself. He hasn’t digested any of the pain of his past, and this play is a potential salvation that’s denied him by Oswald (Adam Pearson), a man with facial neurofibromatosis who is confident, friendly and gifted, unbowed by the strictures of his unconventional appearance. Oswald is a walking refutation of the chief myth of Edward’s life: that his condition defined him. In fact, his personality is his prison.
Oswald is a charismatic person who inspires warmth and solidarity. His extroversion is also a little obnoxious, and his supernatural usurpation of Edward’s life suggests that we may be seeing a guilt-ridden fantasy. Guilt on the part of Edward and of the filmmakers: Edward is guilty of abandoning and marginalizing himself, while Pearson is allowed to assume center stage of a movie that perhaps should have starred him to begin with. We could chew on these reverberations all day. Most remarkable of all is the film’s lightness of being despite juggling so much thematic dynamite. This isn’t a heavy, self-castrating stroke session in the spirit of a Charlie Kaufman movie. “A Different Man” is closer to an art-house riff on the Farrelly Brothers, with Dostoevsky for spice.
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, “Woman of the Hour,” has a wandering sense of unease that’s potent but hamstrung by speechifying. The film pivots on a real and strange event that serves as found symbolism of a diseased society: when the serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) appeared as a contestant on “The Dating Game.” This is one of those movies that suggest that a serial killer’s carnage is but a larger embodiment of the aggressions that women suffer from men daily. Kendrick has little interest here in replicating the mores of the 1970s, only in scoring retrospective points.
When Sheryl (Kendrick) appears on “The Dating Game,” she speaks in contemporary parlance, and the dinosaur male contestants are smote by her wit. The only man who can string intelligent words together is a mass murderer of women. The men on “The Dating Game” definitely said things that would get them in hot water today. They often came off as arrogant and shallow and trivializing of women. And so did the women, who played into the sexist expectations of the show. But there isn’t much room for that sort of inconvenient nuance here, which would have strengthened the film’s general theme. At its worst, “Woman of the Hour” represents the sort of preachy editorializing that reduces so many contemporary movies to glorified PowerPoint presentations.
Kendrick does get things percolating in a scene between herself and Zovatto, when Sheryl goes out on a date with Alcala and senses the nastiness underneath his confidence. In this scene, we’re allowed to react to the electricity of a confrontation between two vivid actors, which happens to prove Kendrick’s point about the nightmarish sexism that characterizes American mating. This scene is a case of Kendrick starting with the drama and working her way outward towards the message. Too much of “Woman of the Hour” is the result of a reverse approach.
I found the war of the sexes animating Damien McCarthy’s “Oddity” to be more persuasive, in part because it’s a genre film that isn’t constantly asserting its sociopolitical bona fides. It’s a trim, tart, stylish, haunted house murder mystery with a terrific setting—an open and chic restored farmhouse that’s brick, wood, and endlessly suggestive negative space—and a palpable sense of atmosphere and dread.
There’s also a menacing monster, two or three authentically unnerving jump scares, and a sharp performance by Carolyn Bracken in dual roles. I’m running long here, so I will skip the plot, which you will be ahead of anyway. “Oddity” is a good movie for Halloween, with textures that reverberate after the end credits have been skipped.
“A Different Man” is in theaters and Fandango at Home. “Woman of the Hour” is on Netflix, and “Oddity” can be streamed on Shudder.
