A Different Man (2024)

Rated R for some gore (there's a very Cronenbergian scene where Edward rips off his deformed face to find Sebastian Stan's face underneath), but the real points go to the very on-screen sex scene that involves nudity.  There's language and violence, also leading to a murder at one point.  It has a lot of things that little kids should not be viewing.  If I have to make a stretch on this one, the movie is about ableism, but very little of it has to do with negative characteristics of ableism, shy of sexualizing some of those traits.

DIRECTOR: Aaron Schimberg

I'm in procrastination mode, which is not a good idea considering that we're officially in Academy Awards season, people!  I am going to be swamped by film blogs over the next month and change, so I gotta stay on top of these things.  The problem is that I find instrumental suites on YouTube and YouTube's algorithm has videos I feel I need to watch right now. It's not a good thing.

A Different Man might be one of the best movies that falls into the A24 trap.  Before I go too deep, I would like to point out that I love that A24 has started to distance itself from traditional horror movies.  I'm all for horror movies, but A24 combined with horror gets to be a bit tedious.  Instead, the aesthetic and attention to craft behind A24 movies is fairly solid with things like A Different Man.  This is a gorgeous and well-acted film that mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do.  If you needed a blurb for a poster, A24, just cite LiterallyAnythingMovies.com and you can use that bit of praise.  But I started this paragraph with a bit of a complaint and it does take away from the movie as a whole.

A24 loves to take an interesting as heck conceit and then run it into the ground.  It's not like A Different Man is a tremendously long movie.  An hour-fifty-two is nothing, especially compared to The Brutalist, which runs at an offensive three-hours-and-thirty-five minutes.  I'm probably going to see that tonight, by the way, so let's see how long it takes me to get that blog uploaded.  Do you think I'll have the energy to write about that at 2:00 am?  Probably not.  But when it comes to A Different Man, this is an hour-and-a-half story tops.  The last fifteen / twenty minutes only added a couple of giggles when it comes to seeing what happens to Edward given time.  The thing is, it almost changes tone as well.  I beg my reader to allow me the luxury of arguing hard versus accurately because it makes for more interesting writing.  While the movie, by its very conceit, is a bit absurd, it overall feels like a grounded idea.  If a man who has lived with a visceral disfigurement, so much so that his life is colored by that disfigurement, what would happen if this man not only gained a normal face, but was also considered handsome?  It's genre storytelling, but almost in the vein of mystical realism.

For a lot of the movie, while the film dabbles in some weird moments, it is telling the story of the too-real world Edward. If anything, people are accepting of his disfigurement up to a point. Still, he seems to only get acting work when it comes to playing disfigured people.  He makes enough of a living to live in a modest apartment and feed himself.  If anything, his major cross when it comes to his condition is a lack of confidence. He has a hole in his ceiling that gets worse and worse.  He's mostly too timid to report the leak in the ceiling because of his deformation.  He also has a crush on the girl next door, which is pretty typical faire when it comes to similar stories.  The eradication of his deformity gives the film something to talk about.  He uses the opportunity to look different to abandon the entire Edward lifestyle.  He gains confidence through sexual encounters and open acceptance of who he is.  He creates a new persona.  But these moments aren't so grandiose that they lack plausibility.  Edward becomes a real estate agent.  It's not that his dreams came true.  He's not a mega actor, which is ironic because he's played by handsome Hollywood actor Sebastian Stan.  He becomes successful at real estate.  

And because the movie is A24, it gets a little weird from there.  There's a certain expectation when it comes to A24 and genre storytelling to get a little weird. But even the next beat, I could accept.  He sees that the girl that he was in love with wrote a play about him, so he auditions to play himself behind the guise of Guy.  The reason that I'm supportive of this choice because it plays with the notions of masks.  It's a key motif in the film and it returns him to deal with the fallout of the personality change that happened in the first act of the film. It's interesting and fun because he receives criticism from multiple sources on how to, ironically, play himself.  It also gives us the opportunity to view Ingrid through a more objective and honest lens.  Ingrid, who comes across as the perfect neighbor in the first act, is more than selfish and a bit of a deviant.  It doesn't negate who Ingrid is in the first act, but it gives us a new lens through which to view her.  I especially love the addition of Oswald as the antagonist of the piece.  There's this very cool meta element of having Adam Pearson playing Oswald. 

Adam Pearson genuinely deals with this condition versus Sebastian Stan, who is only dabbling with this as a role.  This is not meant to be an attack.  If anything, it's part of the commentary that the movie is offering.  It's interesting to see a story about an actor pretending to have this condition acting across from someone who earnestly has this condition and that plays out both in the world of the film and in the real world.  This is kind of why the movie hits so hard.  I can't ignore the fact that the movie takes a real solid stance on the value of representation and how trolls are kind of built out of inclusion.  Edward gets violently frustrated with Oswald's presence and ultimate superseding of his character within the play on-stage.  On top of that, while Edward is the one with the toxic behavior, he is the protagonist. We feel the same frustration with Oswald as Edward does because it does feel like Oswald is manipulating this world to fit his own needs.  That's all really interesting.

I'm going to go as far as to say that Oswald appearing in the film gives the film even a greater depth, allowing commentary on self-loathing.  I always got the notion that Edward was fairly successful for being burdened with his disfigurement, but he is also sympathetic for being limited socially when it comes to success.  But when Oswald shows up and is good at literally everything he does, it's both frustrating for Edward and for us as viewers.  It's this notion that we have to break about ableism that says that the deformed are always filmed through the lens of sympathy.  They exist in a state of "less than" as opposed to simply being people.  When we make movies like The Elephant Man or Mask, we're commenting that the only proper response to those with deformities is a place of pity.  Remember, if I'm using the proper use of "pathetic", not in a hateful way but focusing on the denotation, that pathetic trait is what evokes pity.  I mean, the movie juggles a ton of stuff to unpack over the course of the film.

Maybe that's why the final act bothers me so much.  It is almost an epilogue for a film that has already covered so much.  Edward, through his exchanges with Oswald and Ingrid escalates into Edward fighting for his life.  He launches himself onto the stage, fighting Oswald for his metaphorical representation.  As large and dramatic as it is, it is also completely a climax to Edward's life.  He didn't appreciate what he had and is left with the vapid Guy.  That assault on Oswald cements Oswald as the guy in the moral right, even if he still kind of sucks.  The story, narratively, ends there.  He should drive away Ingrid.  Instead, A24 --and here's my initial point! --goes to the further absurd.  In a means to humorously torture Edward for the next couple of decades, he keeps escalating the absurdity.  He is crippled and is forced to become family with Oswald and Ingrid, two people who he despises.  He then murders his physical therapist because he is the only character in the story who disparages the deformed.  I kind of get it.  Edward is broken and uses that violence to lash out at anyone he can.  He then goes to prison for so long, only to meet back up with Oswald and Ingrid, who have somehow become even more vapid than they were before.

It's so many beats too long and I think it's done for the sake of comedy. The thing is, A Different Man is more of a dramedy than it is a comedy.  You don't need to have the A24 humor at the end of the movie.  I'll go even further.  As much as I like quirky stuff that makes me laugh, the movie could almost completely purge the weirder elements that A24 is known for.  I've said this before, but A24 gets in its own way sometimes.  There's almost an expectation that things are going to get weird.  But A Different Man doesn't have to be as weird as it is.  It chooses to beat a dead horse when it could have dismounted on a real, literal punch.  It doesn't mean that the movie isn't good.  It just means that it doesn't need all of the extra trimmings.