Did you miss A Different Man? It left theaters as quickly as it arrived, despite glowing reviews. The New York-set black comedy about aesthetics and performance of self transcends the stage, ridiculing its Beauty & the Beast-plagued protagonist and leaving pepper on the tongue. Its absurdity unravels with disconcerting rapidity, rejecting every possibility of genuine relief to elicit maximum discomfort. And for audience members who may be adjusting to the new faces, that’s just the half of it.
Edward (Sebastian Stan) has a disfigured visage, and it is the bane of his existence. He attempts to live quietly, although his everyday routines inevitably invite strangers’ stares. In the evenings, he retires to his home, an apartment with a seemingly metaphorical ceiling leak that grows every day in size. An offer by his doctor to test out a miracle drug coincides with the arrival of a new neighbor, a beautiful but erratic playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve). Ingrid overcomes her initial shock at his looks and takes an interest in Edward, though her intentions remain cryptic. One day, the drug’s promised effects come to fruition, and Edward’s facial excesses fall off in chunks. Suddenly, he looks like Sebastian Stan, and he is determined to reap the benefits.
Rather than accepting this change as Edward, he invents a new identity as a guy named Guy. Guy becomes the face of a real estate company, and he enjoys mainstream, surface-level success in his job and social life. But by inventing a character, he abandons any relation to his prior self, and any hope of connecting with Ingrid on their prior neighborly foundations. When he sees her on the street one afternoon, he follows her to a playhouse where, he discovers, she is directing a play about his life.
After Edward faked his death, Ingrid took advantage of their ill-fated friendship to tell a story. Whether co-opting his likeness for art is ethical or not, she clearly thought it necessary to remark on the tragedy, and what a human suffers with such a condition. Although it’s only ever featured in passing, her script’s incorporation of a savior-like Ingrid stand-in is an acerbic nod to her ego. Edward-as-Guy decides to try out for the role of himself while sporting a mask of his old face. He gets the part, but soon qualms arise. For instance, is it ethical to portray a deformed person when one is not actually deformed? For Edward-as-Guy to answer that question would be to reveal his own secret, which is not an option.
And so the drama unfolds. Ingrid entertains a sexual relationship with Edward-as-Guy for his looks, but something (I wonder what?) prevents them from going deeper. Eventually, a different man does come along for the role: a British fellow named Oswald (Adam Pearson). Unlike Edward, Oswald’s disfigurement does not render him self-conscious and demure. He’s the life of the party, and people are seemingly undaunted by his looks. Does writer/director Aaron Schimberg want us to conclude that charisma and authenticity trump conventional physical beauty?
A Different Man imagines a world wherein this might be possible, to the absolute devastation of its protagonist. Ingrid alters her script at every doubt of her doing social justice, and it is Edward-as-Guy whose role in the production is reduced by consequence. The rational thing to do would be to leave the play behind – if he’s not willing to fess up to his deception, what good does it do to dwell? But after all, it’s his story, and if we humans truly possess anything in this world, it is the claim to our own experiences.
Edward-as-Guy does everything in his power to discredit Oswald, but Oswald’s reputation cannot be tarnished. Edward-as-Guy has no childhood lessons to draw from, no long-time friends to keep him honest, and no spiritual attachments to guide his actions. In theory, he is a blank slate of a person. Yet he clings to the cruelty of his past treatment, and the conviction that Ingrid’s decision to craft a play about him is evidence of her love. For viewers, this is an eye-roll-inducing endeavor; Ingrid is quite awful. But for a man obsessed with the humanity she supposedly showed him in his prior state, she is his only semblance of continuity.
Schimberg himself has a cleft palate, making him a trustworthy author for this narrative. He prior explored the treatment of disfigured individuals in his 2018 film Chained for Life, which also starred Pearson. It is satisfying to see a movie about disfigurement that does not result in an Elephant Man-style tragedy. The meta nature of the subject matter and the complexity of its characters are a welcome departure from traditional narratives about pitying the “beastly.” Add in a jazz soundtrack and some well-timed zooms, and you have a thoroughly stylish psychological thriller. Trust that all acting parties, particularly Stan, rise to the challenge.
A Different Man is subversive and unsettling. Its many narrative pivots can be jarring, but when viewed in totality, their sum is profound. How much does our appearance factor into our rendition of self? If we could live a different life with all the memories we now have, would we choose to live the same way? These questions and more are posed, and none are directly answered. Some of the characters have so funneled into themselves that any outward declaration of reality appears more like pretense than truth.
It is in this way that Schimberg, however tongue-in-cheek, characterizes the art world: a sphere that embraces the “next," while relentlessly snubbing the cliché. Edward cannot comprehend an environment that was more open to him when he was considered a societal outsider. And so it is in this world that he suffers the fate of a conventional-looking and -thinking person – as an outsider.
-Lydia
Comments