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DIRECTED BY: Duke Johnson

FEATURING: André Holland, Gemma Chan, May Calamaway, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, Olwen Fouéré, Edward Hogg, Toby Jones, Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman, Scott Alexander Young

PLOT: An actor in the 1950s loses his memory after being struck in the head by a jealous husband, and winds up in a small Ohio town trying to puzzle out his own identity.

COMMENTS: For his solo debut feature, Charlie Kaufman protege Duke Johnson takes on a neurological  dysfunction; but whereas his  mentor would tackle an ambitiously exotic condition like Cotard’s syndrome or Fregoli syndrome, Johnson restricts his theme to humble amnesia. Paul, an actor, is struck on the head with a chair when caught in bed with another man’s wife. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory—he has to be told his name and occupation—and is almost immediately run out of town by a detective who warns him that adultery is against the law and he’ll be arrested if he returns. He knows he is from New York City, but doesn’t have enough pocket change for a ticket there, so he ends up in a small Midwestern town working at a tannery. While there, he meets and romances nice—if eccentric—small-town gal Edna, but leaves her behind once he’s saved up enough for a bus ticket back to the Big Apple. In the big, wicked city, his former friends (a roguish lot) treat him like nothing has changed, despite the fact that he doesn’t remember them, and his agent gets him a small comeback role on a TV show. But will the fact that he can’t even remember names that were told to him a few minutes ago affect his prospects as a thespian?

Johnson’s uses blatant theatrical artifice to suggest Paul’s disorientation. Scenes are staged like a big budget play or a low-budget TV show. A third-person narrator occasionally interjects exposition. Some of the streets Paul walks through look like they are built on studio backlots, with large swaths of blackness disguising the emptiness of the warehouse. Elements from a cartoon bleed into the real world. His own life shows up on everyone’s favorite program “A Silent Heart” (which appears to be the only TV show in existence in Paul’s world). Paul discovers that some real items in his house look like impractical stage props. An invisible wipe tracks his journey from an interior to an exterior location. Voices may be slightly out of sync, and he glimpses vaguely familiar faces. Doctors try recovering memories through “narcoserum”-aided hypnotic regression, leading to a dream sequence that’s only slightly mistier than his regular reality. Paul’s cameo casting in “The Silent Heart” (which, not by accident, involves a trial) throws him into a Kafkaesque nightmare where his self-confidence in what he assumes is his own acting talent is overwhelmed by the reality that he is not capable of processing what’s going on around him. All of this creates an impressively dreamlike world, putting us in the mindset of an amnesiac for whom the world operates according to familiar tropes, yet feels unreal in its concrete details.

What “really happens” in The Actor is, for the most part, easily determined. But the confusing part is what it all means—why bother to tell this story that seems to arrive nowhere? Amnesia, in and of itself, is not usually the subject of a narrative, but a rather common (even a clichéd) device for seeding a mystery. Here, there’s no great reveal—not on the plot, the psychological, the thematic, or the metaphysical levels—although we frequently get the sense that some epiphany is just about to arrive. The colorblind casting (Ryan Gosling was originally intended to play the lead) isn’t especially distracting, but seems to be a missed opportunity for adding another layer to the story; amnesiac or not, a black actor’s experiences in Jim Crow America would have a vastly different character than a white actor’s. In the end, the movie plays like nothing more than a dreamy demonstration of the life of an amnesiac, with no discernible deeper message beyond “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The fact that so many of The Actor‘s individual scenes create such effective senses of disorientation and anticipation makes the movie’s refusal to ultimately resolve itself an underwhelming and slightly frustrating experience. It’s a film that somehow manages to be intriguing without becoming actually interesting; its fascinations are entirely formal and theoretical. You should still probably check out whatever Johnson tries next, though; he has his cinematic technique down.

A word about that large cast: after Holland and Chan, the rest are listed in the opening credits simply as “the Troupe.” It’s reminiscent of the collective credit “the Mercury Actors” in Citizen Kane, and as in that movie, the end credits show clips revealing who played which role. Recognizing the actors is one of the unexpected minor treats of The Actor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, trippy, movie that has themes of reinventing oneself when you think it is too late to do so. André Holland is incredible.”–Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky (contemporaneous)

The Actor [Blu-ray]

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