For as much light as The Actor is bathed in, it’s equally shrouded in darkness. Duke Johnson’s solo directorial debut is a film of bleary sun and swallowing night and almost nothing in-between. It wouldn’t make sense to depict the in-between. That would be realistic, and The Actor is anything but real.
Jubilant strings swell over vintage opening credits as we peer at the peaks of skyscrapers in a still, top-of-the-cityscape shot not too dissimilar from the angle we get on Saffron City in the original Super Smash Bros. The twinkling black-and-white image has a glowy 1950s TV-hour charm, the text surrounded by mid-century atomic sparkle logos (see: poster). It transitions neatly into the doomy film noir scene we open on––the inciting incident.
In a motel room, mid-womanizing, our pitiable protagonist (a terrific André Holland) gets his comeuppance: a chair to the face. As it so happens, this particular woman was married and her husband didn’t take kindly to the idea of another man. The camera cuts out like a light until we’re suddenly in first-person, blinded by bright, canary-yellow beams, seeing through the eyes of our confused lead, Paul Cole. He can’t remember who he is but knows that home is New York City.
The simpleton townies tell him he’s an actor who works in a traveling troupe that has already left town, before telling him he better follow if he doesn’t want any more trouble (they have strong feelings about adultery). But, as we’ll soon realize, the people talking to Paul in this town are the same people talking to Paul in the next town, only playing different characters. They seem to be the troupe in question. This is Johnson’s first mind trick, one he used via Tom Noonan(s) in Anomalisa.
That stop-motion animation is Johnson’s only prior feature-directing credit to date, and he shared it with Charlie Kaufman. It was written by Kaufman, and we’ve yet to find a filmmaker who can operate with Kaufman’s mental and visual acuity while holding a complex story together, even if (by one golden thread) that you have to squint to see. With his history as an animation filmmaker, Johnson was integral in bringing Kaufman’s vision to life. But Anomalisa had that rare Kaufman brilliance, that existential grandeur, that gnawing sense of mystery––hidden elements that magnetize even when you have no clue what’s going on.
Much like Paul, we often don’t know what’s happening, or who is who, or why, or where. But eventually the sheer exhaustion of never knowing begins to evaporate. Paul meets the beautiful Edna (a quirky, charming Gemma Chan) in Jefforts, Ohio, finds love, and decides not to return to New York altogether. What does he care? He can’t even remember what’s there. But everything changes when he’s assaulted by random flashes of memory. Now he’s in a pickle: will he leave Edna to go home and rediscover his life? Or settle down in small-town Jefforts with his new love and try to forget his past? Or… something in-between?
There’s an ever-flooding sense of surreality throughout the film, bolstered by gorgeous miniature sets, dreamy transitions, and an empyrean score (thanks to composer Richard Reed Parry and ex-indie-music-darling Owen Pallett, who’s credited for the arrangements) overflowing with harps and angelic choirs. The music acts like clouds of sound carrying us from set to set in the pitch black of Johnson’s phantasmagorical, stage-like transitions.
When Paul goes from one building (or town) to another, Johnson doesn’t cut away, but he doesn’t depict it happening either. Johnson instead dons a Dogville-esque approach, spotlighting Paul (and whoever is with him) as if on a stage while cutting the light on everything else, leaving Paul in a vacuous, eternal dark that he walks through aimlessly, the lights eventually coming up around him in a new location. It’s one of the many magic transitions Johnson executes with Tarsem-tier bravado.
That’s thanks in large part to the innovative editing from Garrett Elkins, who can string seemingly un-stringable sequences together, and the deft camerawork from DP Joe Passarelli, whose cinematography is among the year’s best so far. He uses light like a master painter, creating hardlined prisms that cut across rooms like lasers, gauzy atmospheric glows that define the film’s mood, and shadows that reveal an inner world more than they hide the outer. The ethereal hallation of the imagery is delightfully profuse, the colors delicate and emotional.
In an unexplained, reality-splitting moment, Paul watches his date with Edna on TV (a Kaufman move, per Synecdoche). In another Kaufman-inspired move (Kaufman was an executive producer on the project, so his influence tracks on multiple levels), Johnson writes doting meta-conversations about living, acting, and discerning what’s real versus what’s scripted, prompting viewers to wonder how aware the troupe members are of their own identity as such or if they’re aware of it at all. Or something else entirely.
Is the troupe part of the story or merely a tool of Johnson’s outside the story? Is Paul actually on a stage at any point, or is that Johson’s preferred style of production design? Or, in the other direction, is Paul ever off the stage? Ever in the real world? Is this all just one long production on the same huge stage? Is Paul acting for us or does he truly not remember who he is? As the opening lines of the film inform us, Paul’s world is “a world in which everyone knows their lines and the only real thing is home.” But… what is home? And what makes it real?
The Actor is certainly indebted to some of modern cinema’s momentous mindfucks––Synecdoche, New York, Birdman, Beau Is Afraid, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things chief among them––but Johnson avoids the capital crime of imitation, delivering a fresh-yet-recognizable take on the microgenre. It’s a trip in its own right, even if it’s missing Kaufman’s trademark sense of existential grandeur.
It requires less headwork than a Kaufman film, which some will certainly appreciate. But at its most abstract, the winding story beats and hazy visuals house less mystery (and, toward the end, tend to drag). They seem more motivated by creating a unique atmosphere and style than unfolding an endlessly complicated origami story. And that’s fine.
The movie looks amazing, it’s often intriguing, the style is evocative, and it should be distinct from Kaufman’s work. But in the ways that it’s similar, there’s less to be discovered––the ghost of revelation where it feels revelation could be. A relative newcomer to writing, directing, and producing features, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Johnson finds the revelatory voice teetering on the edge of The Actor, waiting to dive in.
The Actor opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.