Duke Johnson is a great filmmaker who is very skilled with the use of video and film. This is evident in the work he did with Charlie Kaufman on the Oscar-nominated “Anomalisa” (He also worked on the astounding “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” in 2020). Johnson now has full control over his creative vision with his first solo full-length live-action feature film, an unanticipated adaptation of Donald Westlake’s Memory, a story that was written in the sixties but published in 2010.
Nonetheless, Johnson faces a challenge when transforming the story of an amnesiac actor into a surreal analysis of identity. The always-great Andre Holland is, for a change, back and once again takes a production forward by singing in every scene an underlying note of sadness in which to be, is ‘to be’ and not to be sure why. “The Actor” suffers sometimes from reality, but no one is as interested in the dream you had last night as you are. It also loses the thread of its themes in the overly long middle. Still, it is an unarguably sinister piece of work. A story that has no time and place, and is somewhere like our world, but not. Rod Serling would have dug it.
Holland portrays Paul Cole, a character who gets beaten up in the first few minutes of the film by a husband who catches him with his wife. This encounter somewhat resembles a beating that is performed for the screen rather than one that occurs in real life. Paul was part of a traveling production, which means he woke up in the middle of nowhere with no recollection of who he was before the beating. He is stuck in the Midwest with no money to afford a train ticket, and ends up in a tannery where he works so that he can pay for food and shelter. In the opening parts of the film, Johnson plays Lynchian puzzles where various people are portrayed as the same character, which includes Toby Jones, Tracey Ullman, and Gemma Chan, who, in this case, plays a person whom Paul notices in the cinema. She appears to be the only person who acknowledges him.
The intense mid-section, where Paul returns to New York City, is marked by a long window of time when Paul realizes he does not particularly care to unearth who he used to be. “These scenes of confusion being pierced by attraction yield to a mid-section when Paul comes back to New York City: he might not care to discover who he used to be.” A critical scene, for example, is where his friends talk about a moment they found funny involving an unhoused person; Paul recalls the incident as cruel. It is not only who Paul was that is at the center of this, but what sort of human being Paul was before he purged his personality. How do I become a better Paul? How do I allow an incident to shape me into a better human being and grant me a new part to play in life?
The film Pasarelli is said to have undertaken the project because it was shot on a sound stage in Budapest, so it could enhance the very deliberately dream-like character of the picture both in the gauzy cinematography and the setting, which seems to accept the conceit that the world is a stage… The Actor features unconventional production design and casts all the world as a stage.
Holland captures a man before a mental breakdown, and, like in ‘Anomalisa,’ why does it even matter for someone who’s spent their working life trying to transform into different versions of themselves? Johnson allows us to consider the question: what reality is truthfully needed? What if this simply presents the perfect opportunity to truly become the character he was always meant to play?
This movie includes so many elements, thinking deeply about them makes one wish for a more rigid direction. Deliberate decisions would turn it both organized and free-flowing. Additionally, in “The Actor,” there are an unusual number of scenes that feel incomplete, as if they have been cut off early. It’s as if each part is a fragment of a dream, which can be gently floating but lacks forward thrust. I figured the ‘missing puzzle piece’ was spirit.
Holland is capable of picking them up, for which thank heavens. The emotion-conveying scene is remarkable. Holland examines different emotions he expresses in the mirror and awaits a fitting one. He does variations in these expressions and picks where different mirrors strategically placed make his reflections appear. Through these subtle choices, Holland breathes life into the ordinary. “The Actor” sticks to your thoughts longer than one anticipates, and only because of those choice remarks.
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