adam pearson

FYC 2024: Enter Stan Man

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

It took a while to arrive, but 2024 was finally Sebastian Stan’s year.  Ever since the strikingly hunky actor found early fame in the wide-appeal franchises Gossip Girl and The MCU, he’s been attempting to pull off the Robert Pattinson trick of convincing cinephilic snobs that he’s more than just a handsome face.  Stan has been deliberately eroding his pretty-boy persona by taking on increasingly odd, unlikeable roles in titles like I, Tonya, Fresh, and The Bronze, but audiences have yet to take him seriously by any other name than Bucky Barnes.  It’s clear to me that 2024 was the critical breakthrough in that effort, with Stan earning many impassioned accolades for his two most recent film roles in The Apprentice and A Different Man.  Weirdly, that career boost may have been indirectly assisted by the recent re-election of Donald Trump, whom Stan portrays as a young man in The Apprentice.  Or it was at least assisted by his fellow actors’ cowardice on the subject of Trump, since Stan vented that he was invited to participate in Variety‘s annual “Actors on Actors” interview series, but nothing ever came of it because no actor (or at least no actor’s publicist) dared to discuss Trump or the election on the record.  This news item led to a fresh new wave of critics praising Stan’s fully committed portrayal of the president-elect as a young ghoul in training, reinvigorating discussion of a film that had for the most part faded into the Awards Season background since it premiered at Cannes.  It’s not all just empty political posturing, either; he deserves the praise.

In The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) attempts to diagnose the illness at the heart of contemporary American politics by pinpointing the exact moment when Donald Trump transformed from human being to monstrous caricature.  Trump is already a shit-heel capitalist at the start of the film, when Sebastian Stan is introduced as a racist landlord collecting rent payments & shutting out Black tenants in 1970s New York City.  The punk, disco, and street noise of the era appear to rattle young Donny just as much as his legal troubles and his father’s withheld affections.  Then, the figure of Roy Cohn appears from across a crowded barroom, played like a beckoning Count Dracula by Succession star Jeremy Strong.  In the first third of the film, Strong’s verbal & physical mannerisms are more closely aligned with the SNL-parody version of Trump we’re all used to, and the acting challenge of the piece is for Stan to gradually grow into the role as he learns from his vampiric mentor.  His transformation from status-obsessed dork to the most powerful carnival conman in America is physically manifested in peculiar contortions of the mouth and verbal jabs of one-upmanship against his own previous sentences while bragging to the press, and he learned it all from watching Cohn do the same.  What Abbasi & Stan most clearly understand about Trump is how unfortunate it is that he’s a funny guy in addition to being an evil one, so that The Apprentice ends up becoming a kind of It’s Always Sunny-style dirtbag sitcom featuring talented actors playing despicable ghouls.  It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it is impressive as an acting showcase, which is exactly what Sebastian Stan needed to break through into critical legitimacy.

The only hindrance to The Apprentice announcing Sebastian Stan’s arrival as a formidable actor is that he only gives the second best performance in his own movie, as he’s often outshone by Jeremy Strong’s scenes-stealing performance as Roy Cohn.  Funnily enough, that actor-vs-actor tension is the exact conflict that torments Stan’s lead character in his actual-best performance of the year.  In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role as a failed actor with neurofibromatosis, which hides his face under a mountainous mask of noncancerous tumors.  After an experimental drug chemically removes those tumors in a miraculous transformation that reveals Stan’s Hollywood Handsome face, he remains a failed actor, finding that his lack of confidence & charisma had little to do with his disfiguring medical condition.  Then enters Adam Pearson (Chained for Life, Under the Skin) as the world’s most affable guy, who charms every room he walks into despite the fact that his own neurofibromatosis remains untreated.  Pearson is hilarious as the carefree bloke who completely wrecks Stan’s entire life simply by being pleasant company, but it’s Stan’s performance that affords the movie most of its emotional complexity.  It’s impressive to watch him intentionally play someone who is disastrously bad at acting in a movie where we can all clearly tell he’s a great actor, maybe even with potential to become one of our best.

A Different Man is a great, darkly funny comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity, teased out through the pronounced artifice of stage theatre.  By the time Stan is wearing a 3D rendering of his former disfigurement as a mask while playing a fictionalized version of himself on-stage, it’s clear that Schimberg has created something incredibly complex here, and he found an actor who was up for the task.  A Different Man is a much smaller, quieter film than The Apprentice, which made enough of a stir to be publicly threatened with lawsuits by its subject’s legal team the week of its premiere.  That threat certainly contributed to the good will behind critics’ defense of Stan’s right to discuss his craft in portraying Trump onscreen, but A Different Man is still the title of the pair that’s more likely to land on hipper publications’ Best of the Year lists.  The Apprentice is, at heart, a kind of phony drama that excels solely as an acting showcase for its two leads, who make great use of the opportunity; it’s Awards Season fluff.  By contrast, A Different Man is the real deal; it’s cinema.  In combination, they suggest that Sebastian Stan has finally achieved the creative success he’s been seeking as an actor ever since he first achieved financial success as a handsome face.  Let’s hope all these critical accolades only embolden him to get weirder & more off-putting, since he’s such a joy to watch in that mode.

-Brandon Ledet

Chained for Life (2018)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

For a long time, I considered myself a huge fan of Tod Browning’s 1930s cult-horror curio Freaks, but a recent revisit complicated my feelings on its ethics as entertainment media in a way I never really stopped to consider as a jaded youngster. A circus-performer-turned-director in the pre-Code Hollywood Era, Browning asks his audience to think twice about treating the disabled & disfigured sideshow performers in his cast as inhuman monstrosities, but then parades them through horror genre conventions that require them to be exactly that. Most of Freaks functions like an empathetic hangout comedy where the titular “circus freaks” are afforded screentime outside the exploitative context that usually presents them as monsters. However, Browning’s choice of horror genre convention to tell that story eventually sinks them back down to that exploitative, dehumanizing lens. That exact self-contradiction of phony empathy for disabled & disfigured performers justifying Hollywood’s continued exploitation of those very same people for cheap entertainment is largely the subject of the new melancholy meta-comedy Chained for Life (which borrows its title from a drama starring Freaks vets The Hilton Sisters). An acerbic, behind-the-scenes satire on the set of a European auteur’s first English-language film (after building mystique around himself as a former circus performer runaway), Chained for Life starts by darkly poking fun at Freaks’s legacy in particular, but then expands its critiques to encompass all of Hollywood filmmaking, horror and beyond, from the Studio System past to present day.

Although set in modern day and guided by a post-modern narrative structure, Chained for Life still carries the tone of Old Hollywood pastiche. The supposedly artsy-fartsy indie film with “European sensibilities” its fictional crew is filming feels like an especially sleazy, colorized artifact from Universal’s Famous Monsters cycle. Among a cast of genuinely disabled & disfigured performers with abnormalities like gigantism, conjoined twinning, and disfiguring tumors, a “slumming-it” famous actress (Teeth’s Jess Weixler) gets attention & adoration from the press for “bravely” playing a blind woman. Chained for Life asks, somewhat cheekily, what the difference is between an able-bodied actor playing disabled and an actor performing in blackface, offering real-life award-winning examples like Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, and Daniel Day Lewis as food for thought. The actress’s initial awkwardness around her disfigured cast members is complicated by her increasingly intimate relationship with her co-star (Under the Skin’s Adam Pearson) whose neurofibromatosis exaggerates his facial features with large, appearance-altering tumors. A hint of schmaltzy Old Hollywood romance bleeds over from the movie the co-leads are filming to their “real” backstage dynamic, but Chained for Life is less interested in developing that dynamic than it is in exploring the social divisions between its abled & disabled crew and indulging in the loopy, post-modern structure of its meta-Hollywood satire. As the divisions between the crew break down, so do the divisions between the movie and the movie-within-the-movie, so that any linear romance melodrama or personal-growth narratives are lost to more academic, intellectually detached pursuits.

For a small-budget indie drama shot on super-16mm filmstock, Chained for Life is ambitiously sprawling in its narrative. Its non-linear, loopily meta plot structure allows it to feature a considerably large cast of well-defined characters (although one largely anchored by Pearson & Weixler). Outside its Beware of a Holy Whore film industry satire, the movie also stages a background police investigation for a string of local violent attacks by a disfigured man, subverting the audience’s cravings for this tradition of exploitation by never showing his face as the mystery unfolds. At times eerie, howlingly funny, cruel, sweet, and disorienting, Chained for Life mines a lot of rich cinematic material out if its initial conceit of discussing Hollywood’s historic tradition of exploiting disabled & disfigured performers for gross-out scares & sideshow exploitation. Freaks isn’t the movie’s target so much as its jumping point, so that Browning’s self-contradictory act of empathetic exploitation is demonstrative of how disfigured people are represented onscreen at large. This is an ambitious work with broad political & cinematic ideas that far outweigh its scale & budget, which is the exact balance you’d generally want from indie releases on the film festival circuit (perhaps explaining its Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival). That ambition is only amplified by its willingness to frankly discuss a socially award, taboo subject while admitting its own medium’s limitations in addressing it.

-Brandon Ledet