Film Society x The Student: “A Different Man”

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.”

This is Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” (1977) at his philosophico-comico-thanatological best. Forget pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, happiness and depression, he says. All we can really know is varieties of pain, degrees of ugliness, and momentary relief from depression. What you should do, then, is be thankful that you’re a member of the class of people for whom misery is even a possibility. The miserable life is a privileged life.

If “Annie Hall” and the rest of Allen’s variously-kvetching filmography is a portrait of the miserable life, then “A Different Man” (2024), directed by Aaron Schimberg, is a claustrophobic immersion in the prospect of the horrible life of Edward (Sebastian Stan) who has a facial deformity that causes immense, gnarled growth. Rather than summarize the plot, it’ll be more helpful to establish its premises through a rhetorical Q&A with Edward for reasons that will become apparent by the end of this review.

Q: Who are you, considering the fact of your deformity?

A: Lonely and depressed.

Q: How would you react if a beautiful girl started to treat you like you weren’t ugly?

A: Amazed, flattered, generally hopeful.

Q: Would you elect to try an experimental surgery that would cure you of your condition?

A: Yes; anything to make me normal.

Q: Who are you now that you’re cured of your deformity?

A: Born again. Women are interested in me now, and not because I’m a horror show. I’ll start a career in real estate so that I can use my new face as much as possible.

Q: What happened to the deformed man you were before?

A: Edward is dead. Let’s just say he killed himself.  I’ll tell my beautiful neighbor, Ingrid [Renate Reinsve], who also happens to be a playwright, that the man she knew has killed himself. Now I’m a different man: “Guy Moratz,” a totally suave and handsome real estate agent.

With only three substantial characters, “A Different Man” braids a Gordian knot of plot that must be watched to be unraveled. Something that might get lost in this analysis: It’s a comedy, classified as “dark” or, to the edgy, “black.” Think of an ambulance loading a suicide victim into the back, blocking the street and making it difficult for an ice cream truck and its blaring song to squeeze by. That’s the kind of comedy you’re in for.

Upset by the suicide of her neighbor, Ingrid writes a play about her relationship with Edward and holds auditions for the leading role. Every actor with a facial deformity in New York lines up to play the part, each of them saying that it’s the part they were born to play, but Guy Moratz, still in love with Ingrid, dons a mask of his previous deformity and gets the role.

At this point, Guy is having sex with Ingrid but she insists that he wear the mask of Edward, who’s supposedly dead. We’re only a third of the way through the movie and we’ve entered a textual matryoshka doll of layered identities and spiritual angst that even Charlie Kaufman might balk at. And this is before we meet the third character, a different man named Oswald (Adam Pearson): the effortlessly confident, charismatic, and charming actor from across the pond who happens to have the same facial deformity as Edward.

Oswald is a wonderful person loved by all; nobody even seems to notice his deformity. He’s a better person than Edward was, and certainly more complete than Guy. In fact, he soon takes Guy’s role as Edward in the play, and then takes Ingrid as his girlfriend. He’s got depth, wisdom, hobbies, happiness — he’s the epitome of not letting one’s condition define himself. As such, he’s the catalyst for Guy’s new identity crisis. No longer can Edward blame his depression on his condition, because there’s someone with the same material circumstances doing much better than he ever could.

The existence of Oswald scrambles the coordinates by which Edward/Guy determines his identity and is the catalyst for his descent into insanity. To Edward, Oswald is the impossible contradiction: deformed and confident, horrible and happy. Oswald is so disturbing to Edward that he descends into madness, culminating in Edward attempting to kill Oswald during a production of Ingrid’s play. Clearly there’s something wrong with Edward; something rotten that has always been there, even when nobody cared enough to look past his face and find it. The nature of that problem is a puzzle the film does not solve.

But this reviewer isn’t satisfied with ambiguity, so here’s my solution. I believe that despite our stated desire to treat those with deformity as equals, the very structure of our language makes such inclusion impossible. If I were to ask you, “Who are you, considering that you’re six feet tall?” your response might be “Why should I consider the fact that I’m six feet tall?” You have the ability to discern which parts of your identity are central to you and have the confidence to call out others for misreading your appearance.

When we ask Edward, “Who are you, considering the fact of your deformity?” He doesn’t have the power to discern that the question has been rigged for him, relegating him to conflating his deformity with his identity, and reap the inevitable vacuity and vanity. We asked him about his deformity as if he was on our doorstep on Halloween demanding candy in a mask because we assumed that there was a “real Edward” beneath the face; something beautiful on the inside, as the cliche goes. But no matter how deep we dig into Edward’s psychology, Edward is deformed. He’s deformed down to the soul.

This is a thoroughly disturbing conclusion. It upsets the cliche, “We’re all beautiful on the inside,” and demonstrates that the only reason we repeat such a phrase is because we’re terrified that it might not be true. Hollywood loves this cliche because it makes for happy endings. Take David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980), which, along with being one of the more straightforward of Lynch’s films, is relatively unnuanced in its treatment of disability. The grand thesis of this film is that beneath the deformity there lies a human, and it just takes a basic dosage of compassion and curiosity to find it. This is a film about deformity by and for those without deformity. “A Different Man” is a different type of movie.

Though the identity of the auteur guarantees nothing about its eventual content, “A Different Man” is a movie by those with facial deformity: along with Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis type 1, Schimberg, was born with a cleft palate. His film is better than the classic Hollywood formula of looking beyond appearances to the real person inside. He asks us “What if there is no better person inside?” and watches as we squirm in our seats when the answer ends up being more complicated than we anticipated.

There’s a legacy of short, anxious Jewish men directing dark, cerebral, and incessantly meta/postmodern comedies for a narrow but dedicated audience. I’ve already mentioned Allen and Kaufman, but Jesse Eisenberg and the Coen brothers also fit the bill in part. Schimberg is the newest member of the club and the one who has best reanimated the gorgeous angst of its grandfather, Franz Kafka.