Despite splitting the difference between stage and screen in dazzling ways, Duke Johnson’s The Actor is all shine and no substance. Starring André Holland as an amnesiac stage performer piecing together his past, the part-thriller, part-love story fails to alchemize its many flourishes, leaving only a dull, hollow core.
Adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel Memory — which was written in 1963, but only published in 2010 — Johnson’s second directorial effort features flashes of brilliance that never quite cohere. Like its lead character, the film meanders aimlessly when it should have at least hints of purpose; his issues of identity feature mild hints of metaphor for losing oneself in everyday malaise, but they’re never fully articulated. Its methods also call to mind better works about memory, and a few similar films about midlife crises turned to surrealism (some of which Johnson even worked on, like Anomalisa).
These unavoidable comparisons only kneecap The Actor further by highlighting its failings. Add to this the fact that its race-blind casting leaves a gaping hole in its telling, and what you’re left with is a cinematic misfire on far too many fronts for something this ambitious and picturesque.
What is The Actor about?
In a prologue styled like The Twilight Zone — appropriate, given the story’s 1950s setting — touring actor Paul Cole (Holland) receives a blow to the head from the jealous husband of the woman he’s seeing. He wakes up with no long-term memory, and only knows his name (and his Manhattan address) from the ID card in his wallet. On the advice of local police, who want to persecute him for sleeping with another man’s wife, he leaves, only to end up in an anonymous small town with no money to his name.
As Paul tries to rebuild some semblance of a life, supporting actors are cast in multiple roles in his vicinity — a distinctly stage-like flourish employing heavy-hitters like Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, Olwen Fouéré, and Tracey Ullman — though this is largely for the audience’s benefit. The reappearance of these actors never results in any confusion or suspicion, if Paul even notices. Perhaps this trick of casting is intended to reflect his confusion, or his memory’s fluidity, but nothing in either Holland’s performance, or the film’s editing, ever indicates this. In reality, these encounters might be spread out over days or weeks, but since Paul seems to skip through time with little recollection of the interim — we’re only made privy to the details he retains— they seem to occur right after one another. According to the film’s own language, they ought to stick, but they don’t, turning the repetitions into a flourish with no purpose.
While working at a tanning factory to earn enough for a bus ticket back to New York, Paul meets and gradually falls for a local woman named Edna (Gemma Chan), to whom he doesn’t reveal his lack of memory (and his lacking sense of self), even though he’s begun to recollect a handful of flashes about who he used to be. The more Paul discovers who he once was, usually through information he’s given by others, the less he likes the answers. Old friends and acquaintances paint him as a pretty nasty person, but learning this is not something he really reckons with in any meaningful way (he usually just moves on to the next turn of the plot). Paul never actually confronting his past, despite seeming curious to discover it, robs him of any sense of motive or objective — things that are, in theory, fundamental to this new, cookies-cleared version of him.
The central drama, at first, appears to be about Paul being torn between his new life with Edna and putting together the puzzle of his past, but these things are only nominally (and temporarily) at odds. In going from one to the other (and back) as the plot progresses, Paul loses practically nothing — certainly not time, a resource that becomes infinite through his perception. The way he moves through the world is temporally oblique in ways that we, the audience, notice, but Paul is almost always a mere passenger to the movie, its techniques, and its structure, never bristling against them in an effort to regain autonomy.
It’s a recipe for boredom in any movie, but especially one in which the protagonist is a blank canvas. There is, however, no denying that Johnson and cinematographer Joe Passarelli paint his physical form quite beautifully.
The Actor is a visual treat, but brings to mind better films.
As pithy as the movie is beneath the surface, it would’ve been so much worse had it not provided such an alluring and intuitive understanding of Paul’s predicament by way of its direction. Light moves across the frame in oblique and ethereal ways, as stage spotlights interact with both the actors and the lens, causing flares that dance in tandem with every bit of blocking and camera movement.
There’s a rhythm to The Actor that few works of Hollywood surrealism manage to match. As Paul moves between scenes, lights fade in and out to mark the passage of time, or to disguise the changing of sets, creating a sense of continuity about the character alongside a simultaneous discontinuity about his surroundings. Other times, these jagged disconnects come courtesy of sudden bursts of sensory input — light, sound, dialogue, always something memorable — as if to simultaneously re-orient and disorient the viewer in time, à la Christopher Nolan’s memory thriller Memento. (The comparison becomes unavoidable when Paul begins leaving himself scribbled notes.)
However, those who might notice this similarity are also likely to recall that Memento’s protagonist had both a lucid motivation and an active relationship to his surroundings at all times. Holland, unfortunately, has no such luxuries as an actor, and has to conjure the illusion of drama and desire from thin air. In that sense, his work is remarkable, but he isn’t given the opportunity to play in the movie’s sandbox. Another film that may come to mind is the Anthony Hopkins dementia drama The Father, a stage adaptation whose ingenious use of redressed sets and its re-use of actors induced a sense of paranoia. In The Actor, these things are merely worth a shrug. They leave the frame, and cease to matter, no sooner than they appear.
Worse yet, it’s especially hard not to compare The Actor to Johnson’s own first film (co-directed by Charlie Kaufman), the stop-motion midlife crisis drama Anomalisa, in which self-centered protagonist Michael saw Tom Noonan in every person he came across. The two films have a similar ethereal glow, but their use of perspective differs wildly. In Anomalisa, what we see, what the character sees, and more importantly, how he sees, tells us more about him than anything he says. In The Actor, the similarities of everyone around him may as well be coincidence.
The biggest point of comparison is likely to be the most unfortunate for Johnson going forward: Kaufman’s directorial followup, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, a similarly surreal work of nostalgia and memory (a mostly live-action work, on which Johnson contributed to some of the animation). If one were to split Anomalisa through a prism, one refraction would resemble The Actor — a film that captures the glistening surfaces of the two men’s collaboration — while the other would resemble Kaufman’s solo efforts, like Synecdoche, New York, and the aforementioned I’m Thinking of Ending Things, whose respective tones are much more effective at externalizing complex elements of psychology, the way they’re personified in Anomalisa. It's hard to deconstruct any creative partnership mathematically, but The Actor can’t help but feel like a Kaufman facsimile.
It is also, unfortunately, a historical facsimile, given the lack of adjustments seemingly made in the wake of its casting.
The Actor suffers from race blindness.
Ryan Gosling was once attached to star in The Actor. Plans and deals change all the time, so this is no shocking revelation, but what is surprising is how little attention appears to have been paid to the subtext of casting Holland in a part written for a white actor, a role that originated in the 1960s, and continues to be set in the 1950s.
On one hand, casting Chan as Edna, seemingly the only Asian face in her entire town, adds to the character’s sense of isolation (and perhaps, to what draws Paul to her in the first place). However, Paul being played by a Black man leads to more incongruity, beginning with his police persecution for sleeping with a white woman, a historical precedent with an incredibly charged racial subtext, but, in the film, an incident that’s only discussed in the context of infidelity.
That Paul is constantly surrounded by white characters in a rural town, some of whom look upon him with suspicion, does little to impact the character’s sense of self, though, as he's a Black person living through a fraught period of American history, one would think it certainly would. On one hand, crossing these racial lines has long been common when casting for the stage, so it’s at least in tune with the film’s M.O. On the other hand, this has traditionally been an outcome of the geographical and financial limitations of theatre, a problem cinema doesn’t usually have, and Paul’s is not the kind of role that remains in stasis when he’s played by a Black performer, given the specifics around him.
A key problem with The Actor is that it very much is the story of a Black man traversing through rural backroads and encountering police at a time when this would’ve been especially dangerous for him. Paul may not have a past, but he has an outward present, one that every character around him sees. Ironically, his lack of identity bleeds into the film at large. Like Paul, the movie lacks a distinct sense of self in the process, and comes off as nearly inhuman in its unveiling of this particular story, with this specific cast. All the lighting cues in the world can’t make up for a story about a person granted no personhood by the camera.
