Short-term memory loss is a staple of film noir, a convenient (and usually tortured) storytelling device that mirrors the hazy, morally adrift stylings of the genre itself. In fact, I found a user-generated list on IMDb called “Amnesia Noir” that includes a whopping 75 titles, spanning the classics like Hangover Square and Hitchcock’s Spellbound to more contemporary riffs like Memento and Mulholland Dr.
Amnesia is also the central metaphor of The Actor, an odd duck of a movie that uses noir trappings to tell a dreamy, existential story of porous sense of time and reality. It’s based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, one of the architects of modern noir, which was itself lost to time: It was written in the ’60s but remained unpublished until after Westlake died in 2008.
The movie opens with an illustrated backdrop of a city at night, as the black-and-white silhouettes of a man and woman in bed are interrupted by her jealous husband. The guy in bed is Paul (André Holland), and he’s beaten about the head. He then hoofs it out of town and leaves a lot behind, including his short-term memory.
The following scenes seem to melt into one another, and like scenery changes on a stage, locations merge as Paul takes a bus from place to place. He’s always counting the remaining cash in his wallet, and leaving himself notes with addresses, names, dates and IOUs. He doesn’t remember much about his past, but he has a vague inkling that he has to get back to New York City. He stops in a small town and tells the woman in the unemployment office that he’s an actor. She circles “unskilled labor” on her form.
From there, the movie cascades through memories, some possibly real and others most certainly imaginary, as Paul runs from the law, tries to piece himself back together and falls in love with a woman named Edna (Gemma Chan). It builds to his one-day stint on a soap opera that seems to mirror his own life. He’s playing a character known only as “condemned man,” and as he’s passed around impersonally on the set, the illusion surrounding him begins to shatter.
The Actor is the live-action debut of director Duke Johnson, best known for working with Charlie Kaufman on the stop-motion film Anomalisa. Like that strange movie, in which every supporting character was played by Tom Noonan, identities are also constantly merging here. Holland is surrounded by a cast of repertory players (including Tracy Ullmann, Toby Jones and Simon McBurney) who play multiple roles in a nod to the shapeshifting nature of performance.
The film obviously has a lot of big ideas, though it never quite develops them into anything more than just ideas. There’s not a lot of emotional resonance here, even though Holland’s central performance has a lot of feeling in it.
The Actor was released earlier this year in fewer than 30 theaters and has since been buried on Hulu. It’s not as challenging or emotionally vulnerable as Anomalisa, but it’s more intriguing and adventurous than such a nondescript release suggests, and it has a gentle spirit that separates it from its noir forebears. It’s worth a look.