A Different Man is a tragedy about a man who can only see his story as tragedy, and thus wills it into existence. And every cruelty the film inflicts upon him should be understood in this context. For as much as it is a movie about disability, and specifically our relationship to disability narratives, as both able-bodied audiences and not, it is also a movie about the debilitating effects of the limitations we put on ourselves broadly. It’s very easy for Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan), a man with severe neurofibromatosis that manifests as facial disfigurement, to chalk up his dissatisfaction in life, his lack of confidence, assertiveness, and his insecurity to his condition. But having to confront these as issues separate from that and in a dramatically blunt way, that is a pretty difficult reality to cope with.
Director Aaron Schimberg is fascinated by that psychology, and cares a lot about dispelling such notions as inherent to the disabled experience, using this movie and this character as a way of excising that bitterness in a mean but deeply interesting and effectively darkly funny way. If there was an anti-The Elephant Man, this would be it.
Edward is very much positioned as a twenty-first century John Merrick in terms of his dour living conditions and abiding sadness. He is an actor in a downtrodden New York City apartment whose most noteworthy role is in a PR video for how to behave around disabled people in the workplace. He finds himself unmotivated to do anything about a horrible leak in his living room and is unable to act on his feelings for his new playwright neighbour Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) who has befriended him. When offered to be a test subject for an experimental drug he takes it and his deformities peel away. Killing off Edward and adopting a new persona ‘Guy’ he chases the success and apparent happiness he’s long coveted only to some time later come across the play Ingrid has written based on his life, and auditions for the part originally written for him.
It is in this context that Edward eventually meets Oswald, played by Adam Pearson, an actor and advocate with genuine neurofibromatosis -who you may remember from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. And he very quickly gets under the skin of Edward, as notwithstanding his condition (which is brought up maybe once or twice in his entire screen-time), he is enthusiastic, deeply charming, and outgoing; and as his involvement in the show increases, through no tangible machinations on his own part, Edward becomes more and more paranoid and resentful.
Edward’s story through the movie is a fascinating evolving identity complex that touches on deep levels of both ego and self-loathing. The first act of the movie plays as almost a prank that Schimberg is pulling on the audience, it’s so formulaic to the story of a person like Edward. It’s Beauty and the Beast or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the narrative of the pitiable “ugly” figure hopelessly in love with the one woman who pays him attention or is kind to him. And he draws it in such an earnest-seeming way that you don’t fully comprehend the joke of it until after. There really are some harsh moments there that work as well as any movie mining the audience’s predisposed sympathy for the ‘poor disabled condition’. But both we and Edward are rebuked and duped by it. Edward becomes the handsome prince Guy, wearing the mask of a far more proactive personality, which interestingly reveals both what sides of Edward were genuine and what were not
Edward’s story in the play is what both rattles his sense of self and critiques the audience for buying what seemed to be his story so uncritically. And I’ve never seen a movie more openly in conversation with the ways disability is represented in art, illustrating those tropes through subversion. Conversations are had over clichés and how best to represent Edward’s story, asking why he has to die, why he can’t find love, and on a gloriously meta level, if its appropriate to have Guy (and Sebastian Stan) play Edward with a crude mask. And as it messes with Edward’s self-understanding and personal feelings -there is Oswald innocently pushing them forward and challenging Edward’s identity all the more.
Pearson is such a delight in this movie, a jolt of shock to both Edward and the audience that never loses its lustre. It’s clear too just how much he is enjoying playing a character so unlike any other type of role ever offered to someone with his condition. Oswald is not pitied, he is liked -loved even; he has an ex-wife and daughter and eventually a long-term relationship with Ingrid (though it is implied she perhaps has a fetishistic attitude to facial deformity). But he is also fairly well-off, having made some “good investments”, is a good actor with a photographic memory, and he can sing karaoke with no qualms or shame. It’s a fun performance, but Pearson plays it with just enough hint at some gleeful intentional menace towards Edward that it suggests something more shrewdly sinister going on. Stan meanwhile carries the paranoia excellently, in both broad and subtle dimensions. There’s an awkwardness that never fully leaves him and manifests in the latter parts of the movie as a boiling but uncoordinated ferocity. Even early on though, under the make-up, there is nuance apparent -behavioural signs that he lacks some of the virtue of his archetype. Reinsve rounds out the cast well, attractively idiosyncratic, which hides her bizarre and occasionally inappropriate tendencies. And yet still someone charming and enigmatic enough you can believe one would take an experimental drug for her.
Schimberg ensures the audience’s perspective never leaves Edward, we are made to share his sense of unease, embarrassment, and suspicion. We are also with him, targets of the movie’s cosmic irony and cruelty -yet its absurdity far more apparent to us. Edward gets cured of his condition, but it means he has a hurdle in playing the part made for him. He does wind up dating Ingrid, but she wants him to wear the mask -a cast of his old face that he puts on for the show- when they have sex. And of course Oswald’s whole life is a seeming attack against him, as he becomes an idealized version of Edward, living the very life he always craved -which Edward is forced to witness at close-range when circumstances put him in the care of Oswald and Ingrid’s blooming relationship and booming professional lives. It gets to the point where he is sitting, silent and immobile, at a table where Oswald and Ingrid are talking with a Hollywood star about adapting “Edward” the play into a movie. And the greatest insult in this is that a lot of it was within arms reach before Edward lost his deformity, killed his former self, and became Guy. Guy is his identity for the bulk of the movie, but it is a false persona that contains the real Edward -the one to whom image is the key to happiness; and who can’t handle that ideology being challenged, not just by Oswald, but his world writ large. But as Guy, he still wants to see himself as Edward -at least as the Edward in his mind who is a tragic figure, perhaps heroic; but others don’t see him that way.
And we are encouraged in that more nuanced perception, much as we can sympathize with Edward’s. It’s a transfixing and warped psychological complex, one that gets more intriguing as the movie goes along and Edward’s relationship to Oswald and Ingrid, and particularly where he identifies with Oswald, becomes more hardened -over a period of many years until the last mean note of an ending, restricting Guy as much as Edward had seemingly been. A Different Man is a fascinating movie, perfectly sharp and wicked in both its examination of an ego and its indictment of its audience’s expectations. A movie that demands more Oswalds and less Edwards, much as it endeavours to woefully understand Edwards. On that note I do hope to see Adam Pearson in a role like this again.
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