By Jocelyn Noveck | Related Press
Think about you possibly can get up one morning, stand on the mirror, and actually peel off any a part of your seems to be you don’t like — with solely movie-star magnificence remaining.
How wouldn’t it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life?
That’s a query – effectively, a launching level, actually — for Edward, protagonist of Aaron Schimberg’s fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and infrequently irritating “A Different Man,” that includes a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve.
The very title is open to a number of interpretations. Who (and what) is “different”? The unique Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic dysfunction that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the person he turns into when he’s in a position to slip out of that pores and skin? And is he “different” to others, or to himself?
After we meet Edward, a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate make-up), he’s filming some type of industrial. We quickly study it’s an tutorial video on learn how to behave round colleagues with deformities. However even there, the director stops him, providing adjustments. “Wouldn’t want to scare anyone,” he says.
On Edward’s method dwelling on the subway, folks stare. Again at his small condominium constructing, he meets a younger lady within the hallway, within the midst of shifting to the flat subsequent door. She winces visibly when she first sees him, as just about everybody does.
However later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it as much as him, coming over to speak. She is charming and forthright, and tells Edward she’s a budding playwright.
Edward goes for a medical checkup and learns that considered one of his tumors is slowly progressing over the attention. However he’s additionally advised of an experimental trial he might be a part of. With the chance — possibly — of a treatment.
So Edward, spurred not less than partly by frustration at not having the ability to get nearer to Ingrid, joins the trial. These scenes tackle the sudden really feel of a sci-fi fantasy movie — not awkwardly, however by some means fairly easily shifting genres for a bit.
As for the remedy, it begins working even ahead of anybody had hoped. Quickly, Edward’s pores and skin is beginning to come off in clumps. It’s terrifying. After which he finds himself on the mirror, disintegrating earlier than his eyes. However instantly, Edward seems to be like — effectively, he seems to be like Sebastian Stan.
Naturally, life adjustments, and radically. When he goes again to the identical bar wherein he’d been stared at and left alone, he turns into everybody’s buddy. A girl even needs to have intercourse with him within the lavatory. He catches his personal eye within the mirror, as if to say: “What’s happening to us?”
Edward now makes a momentous selection. He merely disappears from his former life and turns into a “different” individual completely. Now his title is Man, and he lives in a nicer place. He additionally has a job as an actual property agent — the last word face-forward profession, making use of his silky attractiveness.
However Man will not be, let’s assume, snug in his personal pores and skin. Then at some point, he sees Ingrid strolling right into a theater. She’s holding auditions for the play she’s written — a couple of man similar to Edward. Actually, it IS about Edward. And he turns into obsessive about enjoying the function.
In the middle of auditions, Edward runs into one other actor with deformities who says, poignantly, “I was born to play this.” Man in fact can not say why he disagrees — which is that HE is Edward. Right here Schimberg is tapping into the thorny dialogue over casting, and whether or not disabled roles ought to solely be crammed by disabled actors, trans roles by trans actors, and so forth. Including layers of complexity to his movie, Schimberg does each, in a method.
Or ought to we are saying, Ingrid does each. As playwright — and right here, the very good Reinsve acquires an edge that her preliminary, sweeter incarnation of Ingrid lacked — she appears to grasp instinctively that Man, regardless of his dashing seems to be, has a connection to the character. She even lets him strive rehearsing with a masks of his earlier self.
Enter Oswald.
It’s disgrace we are able to’t say an excessive amount of about Oswald with out veering into spoiler territory, as a result of Oswald (Pearson) is the indispensable a part of the final act right here. Oswald is (as is Pearson) an actor who has neurofibromatosis, however in all different methods he’s extraordinarily completely different from Edward. He’s outgoing, participating, brimming with easy wit — British, too — and interacts with the world in methods Edward might solely have dreamed of.
Clearly, this can throw Edward/Man for a loop. Early scenes exploring the dynamics of this unlikely trio crackle with chance, discomfort, generally comedy, generally tragedy.
What’s Schimberg finally making an attempt to say? Right here’s the place it will get difficult. He throws out some tantalizing questions on authenticity in life and artwork, to not point out how the best way we glance charts our future. Then, he doesn’t a lot reply them as shock us with head-spinning developments that really feel, even for these wholly distinctive circumstances, as if they arrive out of nowhere.
But it surely’s an absorbing experience, and Schimberg works with confidence and brio. On high of that his forged is so darned good, you need the story to go on and on — how a couple of trilogy, with everybody returning for sequels based mostly on Oswald and Ingrid?
“A Different Man”
3 stars out of 4
Score: R (for sexual content material, graphic nudity, language and a few violent content material)
Operating time: 112 minutes
