As a teenager, I had a recurring dream of visiting my grandmother, only to find her gone, and everything — her street, her rowhouse — looking just a little bit off. Confused, I would sit down on her front step and think, “This is just a dream. I’ll sit here until I wake up.”
That sense of being trapped in a dimension partway between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the strange, is the disorienting force of Duke Johnson’s “The Actor.” Adapting the Donald E. Westlake novel, “Memory” — written in the 1960s and published posthumously in 2010 — Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance. However, the man taking that journey, a theater actor named Paul Cole (André Holland), might disagree.
A “Twilight Zone”-style voice-over sets a spooky tone and underscores the movie’s committed theatricality. After being caught in flagrante by a furious husband, Paul lands in the hospital with a head injury and without the ability to remember. Stranded in small-town Ohio in the 1950s, knowing only that he has an apartment in New York City, Paul finds a job in a local tannery, a room in a boardinghouse and begins to save for a bus ticket home. Before he can do that, he meets the lovely Edna (a wonderful Gemma Chan) and begins to fall in love — if that’s even possible when your meetings can vanish like missing frames on a roll of film.
The notion of life being edited without your knowledge or consent lends “The Actor” a sadness and surreality that the cinematographer, Joe Passarelli, takes to heart. His smudged, smoky images cast a veil of nostalgia over Paul’s plight as he returns to Manhattan and learns from friends that he may not have been a very nice person. Yet, if you can’t remember, does it matter? Do you cobble together a self from others’ memories of you, or do you ditch the past and start over?
These and other existential questions crowd a movie that — like Johnson’s previous film, “Anomalisa” (2015), an affecting stop-motion wonder he directed with Charlie Kaufman — is preoccupied with identity and isolation. Both pictures share a tentatively hopeful melancholia and a belief in the limited power of romance to heal a broken psyche. And where “Anomalisa” uses puppets to signify a rift with reality, “The Actor” destabilizes viewers by giving strong character actors (like Tracey Ullman, Joe Cole, Toby Jones and Tanya Reynolds) multiple roles in a screenplay crammed with archetypes: the motherly landlady, the mouthy agent, the drinking buddy, the small-town sweetie.
Filmed in a warehouse in Budapest, “The Actor” feels at times like a horror movie about the struggle between amnesia and agency. Scenes snap off, as if the thread of events between has evaporated, and this sense of being unmoored pervades Holland’s beautifully controlled performance. His Paul might be discombobulated, but he’s also terrified of facing a life that could be no more than one endlessly recurring charade.
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