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‘The Actor’ Review: ‘Anomalisa’ Co-Director’s Muddled Donald E. Westlake Adaptation Loses the Plot
Duke Johnson tries to distinguish his own voice with a film noir riff featuring André Holland as an amnesiac trying to piece his life back together.
A full decade later, Kaufman (who serves as an executive producer on “The Actor”) still has a marked influence on Johnson’s solo directorial debut, though it is awkwardly grafted onto a noir-inflected tale — based on the novel “Memory” by Donald E. Westlake — of a man recovering from amnesia and attempting to rediscover who he is. To transition between scenes, the camera frequently pans from an interior to an exterior and vice versa as characters walk from one set to another, aiming less to break the fourth wall than to capture an instant sense of displacement. An extended sequence during a live television taping intended as Paul’s return to acting even apes the showy faux long take of something like “Birdman,” aiming for a needless and generic sense of mounting high-wire tension in the context of a story that otherwise operates at a more subdued tone.
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