The ‘Actor’ Who Gets Amnesia and Loses Control of His Life

André Holland headlining a film noir based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake that’s helmed by Anomalisa director Duke Johnson should be a slam dunk, so it’s more than a minor letdown to discover that The Actor is a work of deadening affectation. Memory, identity, reinvention, love and a host of additional familiar themes course throughout this genre tale about a New York City thespian struggling to figure out who he is in a small Ohio town. Yet burdened by a hazy and mannered style that drains it of urgency and feeling, it’s a self-conscious curio that’s less dreamy than dreary.

In a stark black-and-white introductory scene that recalls The Man Who Wasn’t There, Paul (Holland) beds a woman as she coos, “You’re a bad, bad man.” Their tryst is interrupted by the appearance of her husband, who responds to this infidelity by smashing Paul with a chair.

When he awakens, the world is in fuzzy color, and a doctor (Simon McBurney) informs a detective (Toby Jones) that Paul has amnesia. The cop, meanwhile, tells Paul that adultery is illegal in their state and runs him out of town, forcing him to buy a bus ticket to the easternmost outpost his few bucks will take him. That turns out to be Jeffords, where a dazed and confused Paul learns that he doesn’t have enough money to get him the rest of the way home to Manhattan. To earn some dough, he gets a job at the local tannery.

From its opening skyline to its spartan sets and decorative transitions—in which characters in one locale begin walking, find themselves in darkness, and then emerge in a different location—The Actor steeps itself in artifice. Johnson fashions his live-action feature debut as if it were a stop-motion movie with real actors, and while that’s an interesting means of creating an unreal atmosphere fit for a story about a man who’s literally and figuratively lost, it renders the proceedings awkward and airless. Richard Reed Parry’s jazzy score and a raft of aesthetic motifs are similarly enervating, calling such attention to themselves that they make it feel like the entire endeavor’s seams are showing.

Stitched together with elements from various films, be it Memento, The Wizard of Oz, or—in its deliberate phoniness—Sin City, The Actor is a throwback ’50s saga about Paul’s search for self, which sends him tumbling down a rabbit hole of recurring faces and places.

At the tannery, Paul receives a loan from a colleague who’s also played by Toby Jones, and he stumbles upon a room for rent at a house owned by Mrs. Malloy (Tracey Ullman), who loves watching the soap opera My Soul to Keep. Once his debt is paid, Paul and his colleagues visit a bar where Paul spies Edna (Gemma Chan), the same woman whom he saw at a movie theater playing a Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon. Edna is dressed in a clown outfit because it’s Halloween, and the two strike up a sweet romance, this despite the fact that Paul is in a perpetual fugue, attempting to carve out a new life without first reclaiming his old one.

Undone by short-term memory loss, Paul keeps his facts straight via notecards, and he soon decides that he must return to his NYC stomping grounds. Despite Edna’s unhappiness with this turn of events, Paul departs for the Big Apple and, at his residence, walks in on a half-dressed woman and the man to whom he had apparently rented the apartment. Paul doesn’t know these folks but he does recall his old pal Nick (Joe Cole), who quickly deduces that Paul isn’t all there. So too do other acquaintances he meets, as well as the girlfriend, Rita (May Calamawy), who responds to Paul’s cluelessness by tossing a cigarette at him, and a partygoer (Tanya Reynolds) who throws a glass at his head for reasons that are never fully clear.

Paul is summoned to a meeting with his agent (also Ullman) and earns a gig on My Soul to Keep, where he’s asked to play a “Condemned Man” who tells a judge “I don’t want to die!” Paul is a performer who’s in a constant state of performance, and Johnson’s film swirls together ideas about character, personality, cinema, and the real and the fake. Unfortunately, it does so with both a heavy hand that leads to torpor, and a vagueness that undercuts what it ostensibly wants to say.

In an extended soundstage sequence, Paul traverses a landscape of props, equipment, costumes, and assorted individuals intent on determining his look, his behavior, and his words, all as he repeatedly strives to find out what line he’s expected to deliver before a live televised audience. Cole reappears as a director, acting flummoxed that Paul can’t hit his mark, but by this point, the doubling effect has worn thin, as has the hero’s perpetual confusion.

Holland movingly evokes Paul’s terror (born from his bewilderment), and his scenes with Chan are understated and charming. The Actor, however, renders the couple as concepts more than as human beings. Worse, the film lacks the very suspense needed to enliven its mystery. Questions about Paul’s identity (and the reality he seemingly inhabits) linger until the end, but the material’s monotony neuters its energy.

So too does a script (by Johnson and Stephen Cooney) that trades in wooden archetypes and refuses to complicate its odyssey by addressing the racial dynamics—Paul is a Black man, and Chan is an Asian woman, in rural ’50s America—raised by its casting. It’s merely content to be a bemused reverie, providing a few hauntingly beautiful images (an aerial view of a glowing theater marquee; the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree shining brightly at night) along the way.

The lingering impression left by The Actor is that it would have fared better as a stop-motion animated affair—an approach that would have afforded it even greater opportunities for sad, sinister strangeness. As is, it’s a lot like its protagonist: a striking creation caught unsatisfyingly between two worlds.