***½/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, John Keating
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg
by Angelo Muredda Speaking at a recent Lincoln Center screening of his new meta dramedy A Different Man for New Directors/New Films, Aaron Schimberg suggested the project was inspired in part by the loaded reaction to his depiction of disability in Chained for Life, his previous film. Chained for Life cast Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as an actor with the same condition playing a sanitarium patient in a dodgy European arthouse film-within-the-film about a mad surgeon restoring his disabled charges to normalcy through radical experimentation. Some critics, Schimberg claims, wondered whether it might not be inherently exploitative to cast Pearson and other visibly disabled actors–many of whom, like Schimberg (who has a cleft palate), had facial differences–in a send-up of disability tropes about deformity and beauty. Others would surely have balked at the opposite approach, were he to have burlesqued disability by hiring non-disabled actors to star in a postmodern examination of the aesthetic and ethical traps of disability on film. Why not split the difference and make everyone unhappy with his follow-up, Schimberg thought, by pitting Sebastian Stan, a non-disabled actor playing a disabled protagonist in search of a cure, against Pearson as his obnoxious frenemy–a disabled man as gregarious and comfortable in his own skin as Stan’s character is desperate to crawl out of his?
To Schimberg’s credit, A Different Man isn’t just a high-concept joke about the impossible task of good disability representation that is free from exploitation. For all the extra-textual labour A Different Man is doing as a development of Schimberg’s previous aesthetic interrogation of disability and performance, it’s also a real movie, a grimly funny and provocative character study of Edward (Stan), a lonely performer with neurofibromatosis who yearns for and achieves a magical cure right out of a melodrama only to find he’s the same sour self as before or worse, embittered by his inability to unsee society’s objectification of the disabled, even if he no longer clocks as a disabled man himself. If its last act feels a bit thinly sketched, the film is never dull, its productive busyness largely the result of Schimberg–and Edward–having so many complex problems to disentangle.
As the cheeky title implies, Schimberg uses a bifurcated structure to probe whether losing the visible signifier of his difference makes Edward a different guy–Guy pointedly being the name he chooses for himself after the transformation. When we first meet him, Edward is a Charlie Kaufman protagonist, a nebbish New Yorker who bears a facial resemblance to Pearson (a reference that will be clocked only by viewers familiar with him), dresses in oversized shirts and high-waisted trousers that make him look prematurely old, and lives in a run-down apartment, taking bit parts in works like a thankless DEI training video about being nice to your physically disfigured coworkers. Frustrated by his stalled career and stalling crush on his flighty new neighbour, a fledgling playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) who seems interested in him in the abstract but repulsed by the concreteness of him as a body in the room, and tired of getting harassed by strangers on the subway, Edward explores an experimental treatment that might correct his deformity. To his surprise, it works, transforming him almost overnight, such that he sheds his face and becomes a regular handsome man who could be the star of a Marvel movie.
When the superintendent fixing his leak doesn’t recognize him, Edward seizes the opportunity to proclaim his old self dead, within earshot of Ingrid. Now he’s Guy: successful realtor, model, and ladies’ man. One day, he notices a production of Ingrid’s new play, a romanticized tragedy not-so-loosely based on her disfigured apartment neighbour who died. Though she, like Schimberg’s critics, wants to cast authentically from the facial difference acting community at first, “Guy”–who doesn’t let on that he’s Edward–proves too authentic-ish to resist when he starts wearing the medical replica of his old face as a theatrical mask, soon becoming both her leading man and her boyfriend. That is, until Oswald, a mysterious and alarmingly chipper disability consultant with Edward’s old face, drops into the rehearsals and starts ingratiating himself with Ingrid, offering a searingly authentic reading of Edward’s flat character in the play that threatens to elbow Edward out of the story of his own life in the rewrites.
Though the film operates primarily as a tragicomedy about a man oppressed by his nerves as well as a culture that projects any number of values onto physical difference, leaving anxious types like him precious little room to become a proper person, Schimberg also skewers the tropes of disability representation with keen insight, as he did in Chained for Life. The clever but always character-anchored script satirizes everything from the useless diversity documentary Edward stars in to the magical-cure fantasy that entices him to Ingrid’s asinine characterization of her old friend, who is easier for her surrogate character to love through the aesthetic distance of theatre–especially now that he’s ostensibly dead. Having apparently been the subject of skepticism about authentic casting and exploitation from the disability community himself, Schimberg has some bitter fun with the idea that Oswald’s sensitivity reading of Ingrid’s play–which does, to be fair, seem bad–doesn’t enhance it at all but rather gives Edward a phony depth and gumption that the largely reactive and shy real person never possessed and still doesn’t, trading one flat disability characterization for another when the reality is something in between. If anyone was going to unpack the cottage industry of sunny disability consultants whose efforts at harm reduction only remove texture from the work they’re commenting on, better it be a surly filmmaker with a personal relationship to disability.
A Different Man is on particularly fresh terrain as a study of neurotic disabled masculinity in crisis–not the kind of thing you usually see in mid-budget A24 indies. There’s tenderness and unsparing honesty to Edward’s realization that life as a non-disfigured person really is, as he expected, like playing a previously challenging game on Easy mode. Stan wisely underplays a number of moments where Edward, as the now-passing Guy, takes in non-disabled people’s simultaneous condescending reverence and disgust for the disabled people all around them; there’s a plausible running gag about the implicit violence of the things people freely say to a fellow non-disabled person when they don’t think disability is in the room with them, which Edward at one point responds to with actual violence, committed maybe in defense of Oswald or maybe just for himself. Edward’s disassociated, vaguely dysphoric vision of how people like him are perceived is especially heightened in conversations with Ingrid about her aesthetic fixation on Edward, who never found his way into her bedroom even as Guy gets a fast pass, and who loses some lustre as a looming presence in her mind once Oswald shows up to fill the disabled curio void.
Pearson, often cast as shy and withholding despite his overwhelming charm as a public figure and disability advocate, is very funny throughout, his charisma and lightness a perfect foil for Stan’s increasingly agitated performance. The ease with which Oswald appears to travel through life and the irritating certainty of his notes on the play’s disability representation at once sexually frustrates Edward, who’s never had an unproblematic and charged relationship with his body, and turn him protective of the self he had previously discarded. It spurs Edward, hilariously, to become something like a disability critic himself, giving his own contrary notes on the play, even as those notes are misread by Ingrid as a vestige of a pre-Oswald, ableist version of the text. This metatextual discourse about who gets to weigh in on disability narratives and which experiences matter may go over a non-disabled audience’s head, but there’s a potent mix of dark comedy and pathos to the way the now stereotypically beautiful Guy becomes more recognizable to himself as Edward the more he reads to others as an inauthentic tourist who can’t possibly know his character’s life story, even though he insists–as another actor with a facial difference auditioning for the part echoes–that he was born to play it.
Schimberg’s intellectual promiscuousness can feel a bit scattered in the third act, where the vagueness around the margins of all three characterizations–in service of the pile of ideas their shifting relationships stack up–feels like it needs some shading. Whether Ingrid ever suspects Guy of being who he really is, and whether the mysterious stranger Oswald has dropped into this scene, like Terence Stamp in Teorema, to seduce and then damage this precarious community of two, is left to our speculation, sometimes annoyingly so. It would be clarifying to know if Oswald has an inkling of Edward’s transformation and resents it, resolving to put him in his place, or if he truly is as nice as he says he is and only incidentally disruptive. Also muddy is Edward’s motivation either for being a disabled actor in the first place, given how dire his prospects appear to be, or for casting his identity aside the moment he changes. Is Edward his deadname and Guy his true self, or is speaking Guy into existence and shoving the old face and old clothes into a forgotten drawer in the closet the excited waking dream, soon to end, of an immature disabled man belatedly living out his adolescence as a hot guy?
As scraggly as these developments might be, Schimberg can be forgiven for trading in outlines from time to time, given the specificity of Edward as a disabled protagonist whose neuroses only intensify as his physical difference is levelled. Disabled viewers have long complained about wanting a variety of characterizations–good, bad, or just complex–in any given film, lest one of them calcify into a trope like the supercrip, the victim, or the disfigured villain. In Edward and Oswald, they have something singular to marvel at: the disabled sad-sack and his relentlessly upbeat doppelgänger, a pair drawn from real life, each too complicated to fit into the DEI training videos in which disabled audiences are accustomed to seeing themselves represented.
