The Actor First Draft

Complete first draft for Variety.

‘The Actor’ Review: Duke Johnson's Memory Loss Psychological Drama Fails to Sustain Its Intrigue The co-director of “Anomalisa” attempts to distinguish his own creative voice with a muddled noir riff featuring André Holland as an amnesiac trying to piece his life back together. It can be difficult to step out of the shadow of a creative collaborator, and Duke Johnson only does so fitfully with “The Actor,” his first live-action theatrical film. Though Johnson has had a steady career for close to two decades, principally in stop-motion animation for television, he is perhaps best known for co-directing the Academy Award-nominated “Anomalisa” in 2015 with Charlie Kaufman, whose authorial voice frequently took precedence even when he wasn't directing his own screenplays. A full decade later, Kaufman (who serves as an executive producer on “The Actor”) still has a marked influence on Johnson's solo directorial debut, though it is awkwardly grafted onto a noir-inflected tale—based on the novel “Memory” by Donald E. Westlake—of a man recovering from amnesia and attempting to rediscover who he is. That man is Paul Cole (André Holland), a member of a New York City theatre troupe on the last leg of a Midwest tour. As the film begins, he is preparing to bed a married woman before her husband barges in and smashes his head with a chair. When Paul comes to, he has no memory of himself or his surroundings, only gathering his name and occupation from the doctors, nurses, and police inspectors attending to him, before he is swiftly run out of town for his attempted adultery. Without nearly enough money to take the bus all the way back home, he finds menial work at a tannery in a nearby town. There, he meets Edna (Gemma Chan), a shy outsider with whom he forms a tentative romantic connection as the seasons turn from fall to winter. Just before Christmas, the actor's desire to recover more of his memories wins out, and he returns to New York, aiming to resume his old career and friendships despite his still spotty memory. “The Actor” telegraphs its formal intentions from the opening credits, a black-and-white cityscape of silhouetted, clearly miniature buildings. After the starring intertitles for Holland and Chan, the rest of the primary actors are grouped under the heading "The Troupe," twelve names including May Calamawy, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, and Tracey Ullman. It soon becomes clear that—similar to “Anomalisa” and its use of Tom Noonan's voice for every character save the central couple—almost every role will be played by one of these thespians in varying levels of disguise. The end credits, in turn, provide little sitcom-esque cutouts highlighting each of these sleights of hand. Johnson doubles down on this artifice by relying heavily on backlot sets. Like, improbably, “The Brutalist,” the film is set in 1950s America but was filmed in Budapest, Hungary; unlike that film, little attempt is made to make these settings feel like a convincing, lived-in place, of its time or otherwise. To transition between scenes, the camera frequently pans from an interior to an exterior and vice versa as characters walk from one set to another, aiming less to break the fourth wall than to capture an instant sense of displacement. Joe Passarelli's cinematography emphasizes the haziness of Paul's surroundings, frequently casting halos around any light source in a manner that comes across as gauzy rather than sculptural. These creative decisions, along with a few overtly surreal animated moments and Johnson's penchant for playing rapid-fire montages of previously seen images at key moments, would land better if “The Actor” had a stronger grasp on its protagonist's journey. But for all the emphasis Johnson and co-screenwriter Stephen Cooney (in his first screenplay) place on the uncertainty of Paul's past, especially when some of his less savory traits arise, there is a curious lack of interest in actually evoking the disconnect between past and present self. Much of the film simply observes Paul forming his identity by augmenting his memory with the things around him, rather than actively seeking out experiences that his past self would have partaken in. The concept feels underexplored in favor of a more rote character study, with Paul frequently reduced to stating his bewilderment about the nature of his past self rather than actually feeling it. This approach works better in the first third of “The Actor,” as Paul's interactions within the relative vacuum of the small Ohio town, especially with Edna, have a certain unassuming charm that acts as a balance for Johnson's flourishes. Once the film decamps for New York, however, it gets lost in needlessly cruel recriminations and wan satirical depictions of show business. An extended sequence during a live television taping intended as Paul's return to acting even apes the showy faux long take of something like “Birdman,” aiming for a needless and generic sense of mounting high-wire tension in the context of a story that otherwise operates at a more subdued tone. “The Actor” does partly recover from this nadir, but the pat nature of its surprisingly sentimental conclusion only highlights the degree to which Johnson's directorial interventions feel like attempts to gild the lily, registering as surface-level oddities deployed in a half-successful attempt to replace the psychological insight needed to truly explore identity in such an extreme scenario. The final images, taking place in a featureless void, unfortunately mirror the extent of Johnson's grasp.