Aaron Schimberg’s debut feature Chained for Life is a film about a questionable ‘European Auteur’ making what is clearly a low budget exploitation movie flirting with ideas of eugenics, monstrosity, and ‘freaks’ under the guise of ‘poetic and rhapsodic truth’. Also starring Adam Pearson, Chained for Life begins with a few lines from Pauline Kael which are germane to both that film and A Different Man:
Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. And why not?
Why should we be deprived of the pleasure of beauty?
It is a supreme asset for actors and actresses to be beautiful; it gives them greater range and greater possibilities for expressiveness.
The handsomer they are, the more roles they can play.
Actors and actresses who are beautiful start with an enormous advantage, because we love to look at them.
“We love to look at them,” Kael isn’t wrong about that. We also love to look at people we can from a distance dehumanise on screen. Audiences have instinctively voyeuristic tendencies and after centuries of “idealised beauty” which reached its zenith in Westernised countries from the 20th century onwards, people also craved the inverse. To see those labelled grotesque. The history and lore of ‘human freaks’ begins in antiquity but becomes particularly pernicious as Christianity dominates what is deemed a pure or impure body and physiognomy. Science, religion, and pseudoscience were in concord for too long. From birthmarks signalling demonic dealing, through to red haired children being bad luck, through to phrenology being able to measure intelligence and character traits. Carnival and penny shows entertained Royalty and the poor alike. P.T. Barnum is far from the sanitised Hugh Jackman version in The Greatest Showman creating a supportive and empowering environment for his ‘stable’ of human oddities. Joseph Merrick’s ‘great friend’ Doctor Fredrick Treves not only misnamed him as John and wrongly assumed he had been abandoned by his mother, but he also dissected him at his death sending parts of ‘The Elephant Man’ around the world. To this day Joseph Merrick’s skeleton can be viewed by scientists and medical professionals despite the fact there is unlikely nothing new to be learned from his remains. Merrick will forever be an oddity and the line from the play and David Lynch’s award-winning film “I am not an animal, I am a human being,” makes for an effective fiction regardless of truth.
Joseph Merrick was an ‘object’ of pity, fascination, and repulsion – but he was not codified as being wicked or evil. Even working-class writers such as D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover began coding disabilities as ‘unnatural.’ Sir Clifford Chatterley’s war injury leaving him paralysed from the waist down makes him feel his manhood is so utterly undermined he becomes fixated on ‘siring an heir’ through mechanical stimulation and turns Constance from his bed and eventually from his sight altogether. Horror films were filled with trope after trope of the ‘disfigured tormentor’. Bond villains up to No Time to Die used facial scars or physical impediments as shorthand for psychopathy. Audiences are inured to that representation to the extent that it often isn’t remarked upon.
On the other end of the spectrum is the “inspirational ideal” where a disabled person proves through innate goodness, inexplicable skill, or striving to “go beyond their handicaps” to be more than was expected (because there is an expectation). Simply existing isn’t quite enough. Be better, stronger, and/or a conduit for an able-bodied person to prove what a fantastic person they are for not recoiling and doing the bare minimum.
Aaron Schimberg skewered these concepts with razor clarity in Chained for Life where Adam Pearson’s character Rosenthal has to be an avatar of one or all of these things within the ‘Marked for Life’ movie and as Rosenthal the guy who got the part to play. No matter how many times he tries to explain to the people around him he’s a person with a condition and it doesn’t gift him with anything much except scaring kids and animals and being used to people being shocked, weird, and pitying around him, Rosenthal still becomes an avatar for other people’s issues that they project on him.
Entering A Different Man forearmed with Schimberg’s black sense of humour at the foibles of life and how people act and react to their idea of what someone else’s face or body means makes the work cannily scorching. Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a would-be actor with facial neurofibromatosis. He lives in a dingy NYC apartment block where he’s half-tormented by the landlord. He tries to be as invisible as possible, but paradoxically he also wants to act which means he wants to be seen. He isn’t a good actor and while filming a corporate training video about treating people with facial differences as… people, he overacts. He reads for Cyrano but can’t change his posture. He gets a piece of advice from a neighbour, “All unhappiness in life comes from not accepting what is.” What is Edward’s life? Schimberg cannily dissects the question through the prism of other people making that decision for him once he has opted out of it.
Edward meets his new neighbour Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a willowy aspiring playwright who inserts herself into his life with the casual aplomb of someone who is used to being wanted everywhere they go. Edward is unused to anyone, let alone a beautiful woman, wanting to spend time with him or being curious about him. He remains dour and guarded as much as he’s able, but Ingrid is irresistible, and she knows it. He begins to give her small pieces of himself such as a red typewriter where he had typed lines about people wanting to see his face so they can recoil. Ingrid begins to spend more time with Edward. They watch the corporate video he made (the video itself worth the price of admission for lines such as “It’s not your fault your fight or flight response kicks in when you see someone with a facial difference – it’s just evolution”) and compliments his acting.
A neighbour hangs himself (something Edward doesn’t quite understand because he had a very good-looking girlfriend) and Edward inherits a cat. He watches from the window as the neighbour’s body is jostled around by the paramedics trying to get him in the ambulance while an ice cream truck tries to get the ambulance to move. New York is one big cosmic joke and Edward is never given the punchline.
Maybe part of Edward’s problem is that he’s fundamentally uninterested in the things he proclaims to care about. Ingrid asks him his favourite plays and he mutters something about the one with the salesman and a movie of one he saw on TV, but he can’t remember the name. Something with singing Nazis? They are sitting in the front booth of a diner while talking and people walk past. One stops in the pouring rain and pounds on the window waving at Edward. “Do you know him?” Ingrid asks. He doesn’t but that kind of thing happens all the time. Easier just to wave and the guy will go away.
Ingrid’s interest in Edward means that he develops a crush – one he knows is hopeless but when she moves in to squeeze a blackhead on his nose, he holds her hand a moment too long and she recoils and makes an excuse to leave. Edward decides he will see a specialist suggested by his doctor who has apparently developed a cure for his condition.
“The risk is worth the reward,” Edward is told by the only mildly mad scientist Dr Flexner (Malachi Weir). A 3-D printed version of Edward’s face is made for comparison, and he enters the clinical trial. It’s a mood altering and life altering decision. Edward is more embittered than ever now Ingrid has backed out of his life. He knew she had a boyfriend, and he knew it was a fantasy, but he was compelled to disappoint himself. She tries to make amends with a typewritten note, face cream, and some terrible chocolates. But Ingrid will never see the Edward she “knew” again.
The cure works. Edward’s face is something he can peel off – the pain is worth the gain – and underneath the tumours is the face of a very handsome man. Edward leaves his apartment and goes to a bar. A group of sports fans who would otherwise have terrified him mill around him like he is one of them. A woman signals her interest. Edward watches his face as he gets a blow job (his first) in the bathrooms.
The next day the super finally arrives to fix what is now a massive hole in Edward’s roof but he doesn’t recognise the person in the apartment. “You sure you live here?” “Do you have a dog?” “No, I have a cat.” “What is its name.” “I don’t know.” “You should have fixed this ages ago.” As the super is in and out of the apartment Dr Flexner arrives asking after Edward. Edward ceases to officially exist as Edward tells him that he is Guy and Edward committed suicide and has been cremated. That’s it – he’s gone. Ingrid overhears the conversation. Edward thrown his old life away, or so he believes.
Time has passed and Guy is now a real estate agent. The top seller and face of the company. He’s casually sleeping with a co-worker. He has a fashionable apartment lacking in the clutter of the last. He can go anywhere, and people welcome his face. He is “the man.” Yet, it takes mere moments for him to go hurtling towards his past when he sees Ingrid setting up auditions for her off-Broadway play, ‘Edward’. He ends up auditioning with the mask of his own face to play himself. “It’s a role I was born to play,” he tells her. And of course it is – he is playing himself or so he thinks.
Guy is even willing to let Ingrid claim she had no inspiration for Edward – she made him up. Edward the character is aspects of her own psyche she declares. One thing is true about that – Edward is very much about her as she makes Fiona, Edward’s neighbour, the heroine of the piece. Guy gets to be with Ingrid now, and she wants to sleep with him. She turns away another lover – “I leave a trail of broken hearts in my wake,” and the affair starts in earnest.
That is until the entrance of the remarkably upbeat Oswald (Adam Pearson) who has neurofibromatosis. He was sent by as casting agent he says, but as he can see from rehearsals the part has been filled admirably by Guy and he looks forward to cheering him on opening night. Schimberg switches everything around so the film begins to resemble Dostoevsky’s The Double. Everywhere Guy is somehow Oswald turns up. And everywhere Guy is Oswald easily takes centre stage with no intended malice. Oswald is charming, funny, and popular. He’s British, independently wealthy, well educated, a world traveller. He does yoga, jui jitsu, he wears whatever he wants. He sings beautifully.
Guy begins to unravel as he observes Oswald. How can Oswald be so happy? How can he walk into a room and have people admire him and want to spend time with him? How can he eclipse the handsome Guy? Ingrid begins to spend more time with Oswald and takes notes on Edward from him. The same notes Guy gave her that she refused to countenance. While having sex Ingrid does something to humiliate Guy – she has him wear the Edward mask and then laughs at how ridiculous it is. It isn’t ridiculous when Oswald takes over the role of Edward on the proviso that Guy plays the “transformed prince” version of Edward at the end. But that role soon becomes unnecessary as the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ aspect of the play is dropped completely.
“He’s stolen my life!” Guy cries. Oswald has become Ingrid’s neighbour. He moves into Edward’s apartment. He eventually becomes Ingrid’s lover. Guy’s only recourse is to try to become Oswald – something he can’t possibly do because he can’t understand Oswald. Putting a mask and an accent on to be Oswald proves what was always true – Edward is not a good actor. Worse, Edward isn’t anyone at all. As Guy he had the chance to be anyone he wanted. To be the actor he claimed he wanted to be and the best he could come up with was real estate agent. It would be a tragedy if it wasn’t so banal.
Edward can’t be blamed for wanting to avoid surgeries and advancing pain and eventual blindness due to his condition. He can’t be blamed for wanting the cure. Schimberg isn’t suggesting that is where Edward’s core issue is. Edward’s issue is that he is fundamentally a miserable and uninteresting person who was compelled to pre-emptively humiliate himself to prove the world was going to humiliate him no matter what he did. Ingrid is a monster, and he knows it when he enters the relationship with her as Guy. The only person who tries to wake him up is Oswald as the final brilliant line illustrates.
Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man began as his way to reconcile some of the issues he began to internalise while directing Chained for Life. Watching Adam Pearson being not only an excellent actor but a guy who didn’t want to be anyone but Adam Pearson rolling with the reality of his life and getting on with living it, made Schimberg realise his own facial difference had residual effects on how he had chosen to navigate his existence.
Edward/Guy both being Sebastian Stan is a genius piece of casting. Stan is one of those people Kael exalts. A man whose face is closer to the ‘golden ratio’ than most of the population but whose handsomeness barely registers once he returns to Edward. Both with and without the prosthetics Stan plays a man who only tried to prove he couldn’t and stopped trying. It’s a brilliant performance of a man who sees nobody in the mirror.
A Different Man is an absurdist masterpiece. From the woozy score and cinematography to the incisive satirical discussion on ‘authentic’ casting and the co-opting of other people’s lives as fodder. Most importantly the rejection that disabled people fit neatly into any box. Guy says of Edward to Ingrid “He might have had a life you don’t know about; he might have done amazing things” [sic]. She replies, “Are you suggesting I don’t know the character I created?” It’s a potent impasse in the film as Edward didn’t do anything amazing and Ingrid didn’t create him. The Edward of Edward gets rewritten by Oswald and he’s still no closer to being Edward. A Different Man is one hell of an identity crisis for the man who never changed and never managed to live.
Director: Aaron Schimberg
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Miles G. Jackson, Adam Pearson
Writer: Aaron Schimberg
Producers: Gabriel Mayers, Vanessa McDonnell, Christine Vachon
Music: Umberto Smerilli
Cinematography: Wyatt Garfield
Editor: Taylor Levy
