Review: A Different Man — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

A Different Man

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

Stars: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson

Writer/Director: Aaron Schimberg

 

There are moments when it’s not easy to watch A Different Man – and I don’t just mean the scene where a medical procedure causes a fellow’s disfigured face to slough off in chunks, revealing the “normal” face beneath the old one.

In writer/director Aaron Schimberg’s dark, funny, heartbreaking fable, the deepest discomfort comes in recognizing that universal human instinct to long for what we don’t have – and then pine for what was lost in gaining it.

Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a man with neurofibromatosis, a condition that has caused his face to become a mask-like mass of benign tumors, large and small. The condition is vanishingly rare (although not as rare as Proteus syndrome, The Elephant Man’s disease, with which it is often confused). His is a lonely existence, puttering around his squalid Manhattan apartment, then dejectedly surrendering to the stares and recoiling horror of strangers when he goes out.

Edward’s cruel fate is compounded by the fact that his dream is to be an actor. Day after day he goes to auditions, desperately hoping a director will see the artist behind the twisted face. His best chance would seem to be as the facially divergent Cyrano de Bergerac, but even after a heartfelt reading, it’s clear the producers are looking for a classically noble face to go with that prominent proboscis.

During a regular doctor visit, Edward learns of a highly experimental drug treatment that offers the chance of a normal face – and a normal life. At first, he resists the notion. But some tentative encounters with his lovely neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a fledgling playwright, ignite a spark of hopefulness. Soon Edward is on a procedure table at a gleaming clinic, hyperventilating as four tubes feed scary-looking chemicals into his face.

Then comes that kinda gross transformation sequence, unfolding over a number of days and culminating in an absolutely horrible Grand Guignol finale.

In a clean break with his old self, Edward “kills” off his old identity in a fake suicide and emerges as “Guy,” a devilishly handsome, ridiculously successful New York real estate broker. Women love him, men want to be him. He’s got it all.

Of course, we know full well the film is not going to let things rest here, and after an unspecified period Guy reconnects with Ingrid, the woman who inspired all this change, without letting on who he really is.

It’s here that A Different Man doesn’t just jump the rails, it takes an Evel Knievel-like, rocket-powered leap to a whole ’nother realm. Guy discovers that Ingrid is producing and directing a play she wrote; a play about a disfigured man named Edward who kills himself after falling in love with his beautiful neighbor.

Most galling: She insists the whole thing is a product of her imagination.

Before long, the sound of other shoes dropping becomes deafening as Guy comes to realize not only is he now utterly unfit to step into the role he was born to play, but the guy who’s playing Edward (British actor Adam Pearson), also born with neurofibromatosis, is comfortable in his own skin in ways the real Edward never was: a charming raconteur, an irresistible ladies’ man, the life of every party…and a kind, generous soul.

A Different Man plays as a pitch-dark comedy, with uncomfortable laughs throughout (the scene where a musical ice cream truck tries to nudge its way around an ambulance taking on a dead body is just so, so wrong). But the laughs are earned thanks to an all-in cast that plunges head-first into the cockeyed material.

As Edward/Gus, Stan (currently also starring as Donald Trump in The Apprentice) brings absolute credulity to an incredible premise: Even under a truckload of prosthetics, his uneasy stance and helplessly hanging arms evoke a sweet kind of hopelessness. Most breathtaking is the moment when Edward, with his new face, ventures into the world for the first time. He walks a city sidewalk at night, wide-eyed at the spectacle of not being stared at; not causing people to turn away. Instead, with the countenance of a child on Christmas morning, it begins to dawn on him that he is walking the world without anyone giving him a second thought.

Moments later, Edward drops into the bar he has frequented for years. Sitting there unrecognized, he at first flinches when a swarm of celebrating Mets fans pours in, drunk and delirious. But as they throw their arms over his shoulders and begin hooting in exhilaration, Edward, too, slowly picks up the rhythms of anonymous brotherhood. He glances from face to face, his mouth wide open in a childish “Oh.” It is a moment of pure, unfiltered wonder, accomplished by an actor of uncommon insight.

The rest of the cast is equally marvelous: Reinsve also played a woman of bold, borderline-abusive self-confidence in The Worst Person in the World, and here she’s a similarly self-absorbed go-getter, oblivious from the start concerning Edward’s inner torment (when Gus dons a mask made from a cast of his old face, Ingrid doesn’t even recognize it). Still, although her naked opportunism flies in the face of Edward/Gus’s earnestness, she’s not a bad person; just a human making decisions on the fly, often based on bad information, much as Edward does.

Pearson arrives rather late in the narrative as Oswald, the bon vivant Brit, but he may be an early favorite for a Supporting Actor Oscar. Radiating confidence and endless good humor, Pearson’s Oswald is easily the most likeable figure in the film. Still, Oswald is not without avarice as he seizes the opportunity to push Gus aside, albeit apologetically, to get what he wants from the easily manipulated Ingrid.

Writer/director Schimberg has explored the tenuous relationship between the world and those with disfigured features before, in his equally uneasy 2018 feature, Chained for Life, also costarring Pearson. Seldom has anyone so deftly walked the tightrope of thoughtful consideration of society’s physical outliers without tumbling into the chasm of unintentional exploitation.

A Different Man sometimes loses track of its myriad commentaries on society’s demands for conformity, and the film seems uncertain regarding precisely how it should wrap things up. But you’ve never seen a movie quite like it, nor characters exactly like these. You’ll want to watch it from beginning to end. But please don’t stare.