Although Charlie Kaufman is often thought of as a singular auteur, most of his best works have been the result of collaborations; Spike Jonze directed his scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Michel Gondry adapted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even George Clooney took a pass at Kaufman’s unusual espionage satire Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Among the most unique of Kaufman’s partners is Duke Johnson, who served as his co-director on the 2015 animated film Anomalisa. While it was hardly the first stop-motion film aimed at an adult audience, Anomalisa’s animation didn’t preclude it from being a distressing examination of the human condition. Kaufman’s sense-of-humor is often slanted towards the absurd, but Anomalisa proved to be one of his more accessible features, even if it headed straight into surrealist territory by the point in which David Thewlis’ motivational speaker is tormented by a Japanese animatronic doll. Kaufman showed his strength as a sole writer-director with his undervalued psychological drama I’m Thinking of Ending Things a few years later, but the acclaim for Anomalisa generated hype for what Johnson could do on his own.
Like many of Kaufman’s films, Johnson’s solo directorial debut The Actor is an adaptation in the loosest possible sense. Donald E. Westlake’s novel Memory was written in 1963, but held from release until after the author’s death due to concerns by publishers about its marketability. Similar uneasiness handicapped The Actor, as the project spent several years in development. Although Andre Holland ended up replacing Ryan Gosling, who dropped out amidst scheduling conflicts, The Actor was oddly held from fall festivals, which would’ve offered it the opportunity to become a critical breakout. Dumped by NEON in the middle of March with its first trailer released only weeks before the premiere, The Actor may be the year’s most befuddling afterthought.
It’s not hard to see why The Actor inspired so much hesitancy, as a description of its narrative wouldn’t offer a concrete understanding of the off-kilter vibe that Johnson created. While the story’s loosely centered around the misadventures of the amnesiac actor Paul Cole, its intrigue is based within its ambiguous reality. Paul hasn’t confused his own life for the one that he’s created on stage, as his uncertainty is retained during encounters with figures from both his personal and professional experiences. The best thing to be said of The Actor is that it’s an acute visualization of what it feels like to dream; events happen without a clear end or beginning, and the circumstances change whenever the logic threatens to collapse the stakes.
Unfortunately, The Actor is crafted by someone who has worked with Kaufman’s sandbox, but doesn’t show an understanding of why his work is so visceral. The trippy, atmospheric version of New York City in the 1950s is beautifully rendered, but in The Actor, the backdrop has little connection to the character development. Paul’s only fascinating in the sense that he’s so easily impressionable that he can congeal to any expectations others have based on their limited memories of him.
Contrary to the reputation that he earned, Kaufman has never been a storyteller whose narratives begin in the abstract. The compelling, and occasionally maddening, thrill of masterworks like Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that they begin in a reality that’s only slightly divorced from our own, and subsequently chip away their verisimilitude, one idiosyncrasy at a time. The Actor is set within a distorted version of the 1950s theater scene from the beginning, as the painterly, picturesque quality would imply that the entire world’s a stage. Yet, Paul rarely finds more truth in performance than he does in his casual interactions; his slow process of self-actualization during an awkward conversation with cohorts at a bar is nearly identical to a fiery monologue given in a staged courtroom appeal.
It would be unfair to judge Johnson only as a Kaufman acolyte, but too much of The Actor is derivative of the latter’s most recognizable works. The strangeness of a celebrity that everyone seems to recognize, but not truly understand is a less perceptive (and much less amusing) riff in the central conceit of Being John Malkovich; similarly, the recurring appearances of familiar faces that occupy different characters was far better rendered in Anomalisa. Even the doomed romance between Paul and his co-star Edna (Gemma Chan) is an imitation of the painful, one-sided lust between a lonely janitor and his imagined girlfriend in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Perhaps Johnson’s intent was to link the repetitive nature of performance with similarly laborious tasks in real life, but Paul doesn’t find truth in either due to The Actor’s cryptic construction. Based on the awkward, abrupt shifts between set pieces, it's hard to justify the haphazard structure of The Actor as intentionally off-putting, as it may simply be the result of narrative messiness. There’s no fault in a film with no provided answers for its ambiguities, but The Actor is equally unclear on what its questions are.
It’s hard to dismiss a project as ambitious as The Actor, but it's equally challenging to recommend a film that’s an imitation of a better writer’s work. There may be a future for Johnson, as his visual stylism is strong enough to imagine he might be better suited for less opaque material. Nonetheless, those impressed by the brilliance of Anomalisa need no further evidence to determine which of its collaborators made the more meaningful contributions.