K. Austin Collins
In Aaron Schimberg’s latest film, the director playfully upends assumptions about disability and representation.
Renate Reinsve as Ingrid and Sebastian Stan as Edward in A Different Man. Courtesy A24. Photo: Matt Infante.
A Different Man, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg,
now playing in theaters
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Who could forget The Elephant Man? Especially a tantalizing early scene in which Sir Frederick Treves, a Victorian physician exploring a London sideshow, sidles through multiple passages marked “No Entry”—a signal, to taboo-hunters, to do precisely the opposite—toward a cache of displays that have been hidden out of view of polite society, for good reason. His destination is Joseph Merrick (“John” in the movie), who bears the cruel nickname of the film’s title and is famed for the stunning extremity of his disfigurement. Treves arrives just as authorities are shutting the display down—because Merrick, in their view, is monstrous. “He’s a freak,” Merrick’s proprietor argues in protest. “How else will he live?”
The Joseph Merrick analogues of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man have at least one answer to that question: they can become actors. No longer hidden from view, no longer beholden to abusive middlemen or a patronizing medical establishment, they avail themselves of their right to profit directly from their faces—even if this mostly amounts to playing facially disfigured office workers in white-collar sensitivity-training videos. Edward (Sebastian Stan), a nebbishy, thirtysomething actor with neurofibromatosis, is one such performer, and the bleak comedy that is his life offers little in the way of additional prospects. A corrosive patch of mold festers on the living-room ceiling of his dingy New York apartment; his across-the-hall neighbor, who mutters “Jesus Christ” every time he meets Edward in the halls, hangs himself; people stare on the subway. To make matters worse, his attractive, yappy neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), is a playwright whose persistent visits and earnest promises to cast Edward in a play teeter uncomfortably between politeness and pity, which Edward misinterprets as flirtation.
Sebastian Stan as Edward in A Different Man. Courtesy A24. Photo: Matt Infante.
She does write him a part, eventually—but Edward, as she knows him, is no longer around to play it. A Different Man tracks what happens when Edward signs up for a mysterious trial treatment for his condition and it unexpectedly works—works so well, in fact, that the tumors literally melt off his face and, bloody as a hatchling bird, a new man emerges. The old Edward is said to have died by suicide. This new man changes his name (to Guy) and replaces Edward’s cross-armed hunch with a burgeoning confidence: he hooks up in bar bathrooms, perfects a megawatt smile for a career in real estate, and sleeps with coworkers. It’s Guy who stumbles, by accident, into auditions for Ingrid’s debut play some years later. The show is about a neighbor she once had, a man with facial differences who, tragically, ended his life. A man named Edward. The play—horrifically, comically, obviously—is about him.
Adam Pearson as Oswald and Sebastian Stan as Edward in A Different Man. Courtesy A24. Photo: Matt Infante.
Schimberg is a mischievous one. A Different Man is his third feature, and the premise of his work to date has been to take assumptions regarding disability and its attendant perils, like liberal empathy and Hollywood representation, and spin them all into a probing, metafictional mélange. There’s a hypothetical version of A Different Man in which Edward is performed, from the start, by an actor with neurofibromatosis. Schimberg takes that idea, born of worthwhile but enervating debates over who should get to play what, and engineers a trap. Post-medical-procedure Edward, who has the face of Sebastian Stan, attempts to play “Edward” in Ingrid’s production while wearing a prosthetic mask of his old visage. (Prior to his emergence as Guy, Stan performs underneath layers of prosthetic makeup.) But he’s soon undercut by Oswald, a man who also has neurofibromatosis, but who’s played by an actor, Adam Pearson, who actually has the condition in real life. Pearson is the only lead performer here, some might argue, with the moral standing to play Edward in either Ingrid’s play or Schimberg’s movie. And Schimberg, diving into the ironic possibilities, spins all of this into an epic joke. There is the friction provoked by Oswald, who shows up à la Eve Harrington, a seeming naïf primed to push Edward out of a role based on his own life, and there’s the meta-conflict between Stan and Pearson, the slipperiness over which roles belong to which bodies.
Adam Pearson as Oswald in A Different Man. Courtesy A24. Photo: Matt Infante.
Film audiences were first introduced to Pearson as one of the memorably tragic victims of alien fembot Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). His more exciting work has been with Schimberg, whose first project with Pearson was 2018’s Chained for Life. The filmmaker matches Pearson’s natural, charismatic sense of play, his utter nonchalance toward his condition, which is precisely the attitude that throws Edward, with all his inner torture, into relief. Stan’s new-faced Edward spirals into crisis thanks to Oswald, who displays none of the discontent that Edward had before his operation—a knowing gambit, on Schimberg’s part, and a clue to what makes his work stealthily political. A Different Man teases the idea that Edward has just missed the boat on benefiting from the right kind of liberal sympathy—that, thanks to Oswald, who begins to get raves for his performance as “Edward” in Ingrid’s play, deformity is suddenly in. It’s the new hot thing, and Edward no longer has the face to take advantage of it. He’s all torn up, in the end, because he’s sold himself out. Not only that, but Oswald, by virtue of being Oswald, has completely shown him up.
Sebastian Stan as Edward, Renate Reinsve as Ingrid, and Adam Pearson as Oswald in A Different Man. Courtesy A24. Photo: Matt Infante.
There’s a visual gag, echoed throughout A Different Man, of multiple strangers reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, that parable of racial and physiognomic difference and the desire to be “normal,” in ways not unfamiliar to Edward. Morrison’s novel is also a totem of the well-read and well-meaning—nevertheless, the people caught perusing it stare crudely at Edward’s face. That is the joke. Just as it is a joke that Edward’s rude, skulking neighbor, who is hardly a Fabio but is seen with a beautiful woman on his arm—Edward’s unattained ideal—hangs himself anyway. Schimberg is as poised as ever to give the audience a hard time, eagerly and deftly poking at the contradictions underlying polite attitudes. He has that great comic-director knack for summing a character up in a spare gesture or reaction, as when Ingrid sees a photo of baby Edward and, noticing the lack of tumors, looks back at him with a face that openly wonders, What happened? Or as when Edward’s landlord demands that his tenant take a quick look at a knob growing on his neck, as if Edward’s own condition made him an expert on every garden-variety boil. Even the drama at the core of all this confusion and conflict, Ingrid’s Edward, is a joke. The scenes we see are convex-mirror distortions of episodes we witnessed earlier between Ingrid and Edward, when they were neighbors—moments given a mawkish lilt, a moral correctness that says more about Ingrid’s ego than about the disfigured man. About the man, it would be impossible for Ingrid’s play to say less. Schimberg’s film says it all.
K. Austin Collins is a film critic whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic. He is the author of forthcoming books on Frederick Wiseman and Black police officers.