André Holland & Gemma Chan in Opaque Period Drama

There’s something initially alluring about the way Duke Johnson uses surrealism in his solo directorial feature The Actor. The film stars the gifted André Holland as a theater performer who becomes an amnesiac after suffering a violent blow to the head. His attacker is the angry husband of the woman with whom he’s having a torrid affair. We don’t see much of the instigating incident, but Johnson offers enough glimpses at the start of the film to help us figure out what happened.

The Anomalisa co-director adapted this screenplay, which he wrote with Stephen Cooney, from Donald E. Westlake’s thriller Memory. The novel is propulsive; its drama immediate and matter-of-fact. Johnson slows it down for us in The Actor, choosing a gauzy style and languid pace to shape his film like a dream you might appreciate but ultimately struggle to remember. 

When we meet Paul Cole (Holland), he’s waking up from an unintended slumber. His vision is slightly blurred and it takes a minute for the operating room to come into focus. Johnson briefly opts for a subjective point of view, placing us in Paul’s awakening perspective. A doctor asks the actor for his name; Paul replies with some trepidation. The brawl was nasty and the police were involved. Paul, we quickly come to understand, is lucky to be alive. 

It’s the 1950s, somewhere in the middle of America and the fact that Paul was sleeping with a married white woman scandalizes the community. An undercurrent of racism is suggested, but not explored with satisfactory depth. Holland, with his expressive eyes and sensitive approach to character work, brings some of it to the fore, but there’s only so much a performer can do with thin material.

Soon after Paul wakes up, local authorities run him out of the suburb. With few memories and a little cash, the actor catches a bus to a sleepy factory town. There he finds lodging and a job. He also meets a girl, a costume designer named Edna (Gemma Chan of Let Them All Talk and Crazy Rich Asians), and they fall in love. 

Working with Anomalisa cinematographer Joe Passarelli, Johnson casts Paul’s experiences in a beguiling and ephemeral glow. The visuals are soft and cloudy, as if blanketed by a gossamer veil, and movement between scenes possess a feathery quality (editing is by Garret Elkins). Richard Reed Perry (Eileen, The Iron Claw) composes a score of appropriately spectral quality, and Paulina Rzeszowska, who did production design on Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, builds an equally haunting world.

All of these elements add to the film’s unreality, making you wonder which parts of Paul’s life we can trust. All? Some? None? People are relational creatures, shaped by the dictates of their environment. Isn’t the Paul in Ohio just as real as the one in New York? Maybe. But when the actor makes his way back to the East Coast, he discovers an old self that couldn’t be more different than he imagined. 

The Actor can be fun to think about, but hard to stay connected to. Johnson’s film works on an intellectual level — batting around questions about how identity is constructed — but the director struggles to translate the stakes of those questions. Paul’s story can feel meandering, even aimless, as he struggles to put his life back together. Scenes are presented in fits and starts, perhaps as a way to mimic his flickering memory, but they suffer under the commitment to blurring the lines between dreams and reality. The seductive quality of Johnson’s surrealist experiment falls away, replaced by frustration at its opacity. A little uncertainty is never bad in a film, but the not knowing should inspire a sense of thrill. 

There are some moments when The Actor does rouse with inspired romantic set pieces and funny reflections on the whole business of performing. Holland and Chan’s chemistry makes it easy to invest in Paul’s relationship with Edna; their romance is compelling and poignant. Although Paul’s life in New York is too vaguely sketched at times, it does offer Johnson an opportunity to satirize the more theatrical valences of the entertainment industry. It also lets Holland play, using the character to search for different ways of expressing alienation and a frightening discombobulation. One only wishes that all these elements amounted to a film that didn’t feel so diffuse.