A Different Man Tries To Tell a Different Story About Disability

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man starts out as a kind of movie-of-the-week examination of the plight of the disabled. But halfway through it takes a sharp turn, transforming (in parallel with its protagonist) into an odd doppelganger parable about losing purchase on one’s own life. The switch is a welcome relief from, and a nicely snide comment on, tragic disability. Schimberg arguably is so taken with his own cleverness that he loses track of the disabled person he’s making a movie about losing track of.

A Different Man’s protagonist is Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis—he has numerous large tumors on his face. Edward, played by Sebastian Stan with (initially) facial prosthetics, is shy, passive, and frustrated in his sexual life. He’s unable to follow through on the possible romantic interest of his playwright neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve).

Things change radically when Edward’s doctor puts him on an experimental drug to try to shrink his tumors. The result is miraculous; Edward’s tumors peel off, leaving him with the face of Sebastian Stan. Edward pretends he has committed suicide, and takes up a new life as a successful real-estate salesman named Guy. By accident, though, he stumbles on a casting call for Ingrid’s new play called “Edward,” about his former self.

Guy gets the part (wearing a prosthetic) and starts sleeping with Ingrid (who doesn’t know about his past). All seems to be going well, until a man named Oswald shows up at rehearsals. Oswald—played by Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis— looks like Guy used to. But he’s outgoing, gracious, happy, sexually active, and (thanks to Pearson’s brilliant performance) magnetically charismatic. He’s everything Guy/Edward wanted to be, and with good cheer and grace, he starts to replace Guy/Edward in his own life.

Ingrid’s play-within-a-movie repeats the same tragic disabled tropes that the movie initially embraces; Edward in the play is inarticulate, romantically hapless, and ultimately commits suicide. Guy critiques these stale clichés explicitly, as Oswald’s existence and demeanor critiques them implicitly. Disabled people don’t have to be objects of pity whose purpose is to inspire or evoke sentiment in others. They can have their own stories.

Those stories don’t need to be about overcoming disability, or living full lives. Edward, the movie suggests, isn’t (or not just) someone afflicted; he’s who he is because of his face. With a different, more “normal” face, he becomes (like the title says) a different man—one who’s (for example) a real estate salesman rather than an actor, and one who’s not really suited to play the role Ingrid wrote especially for him. Oswald, with his disfigurement, is who Edward was—a real person—while Guy’s just a guy. He could be anyone, which means he’s no one.

Edward’s cure ends up being a curse, because it alienates him from himself—and numerous disability activists have argued that the obsession with cures, and the suffering of the disabled, is a disservice. Many deaf people, for example, point out that deaf culture is valuable and worthwhile, and that the effort to cure deafness, or eliminate deaf people, is wrongheaded and immoral.

Disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson wrote, “The widespread assumption that disability means suffering feeds a fear of difference and a social order that doesn’t know what to do with us if it can’t make us fit its idea of normal.” She adds, “When nondisabled people start learning about disability, what seems most startling, most difficult to accept, is the possibility of pleasure.”

Adam Pearson makes Oswald a man whose life is filled with pleasure, friendship, love, and exploration. That’s a powerful rebuke to a lot of what we see about disability on screen. At the same time, though, Oswald’s lightness and joy seem to be possible in part by eliding his disability, or erasing it from the screen. Part of why Edward/Guy looks at Oswald with such envy and confusion is that nobody else seems to notice Oswald’s tumors.

Before Edward’s cure, we see people looking away from him, staring at him, or expressing discomfort in his presence—or insisting that they know him, presumably because they’ve met someone else with his condition and can’t tell them apart. We never see this happen to Oswald, who’s apparently just so wonderful and self-confident that no one notices his difference—an absurdist plot twist which suggests (I’m sure unintentionally) that disabled people only face discrimination when they’re not sufficiently bubbly.

The movie also downplays, or forgets, that neurofibromatosis can come with serious health complications. Edward feels his appearance is a burden. But the reason he agrees to the experimental treatment initially is that he has tumors growing over his eye, and tumors growing in his ears; without surgery or some intervention, he’ll lose sight and hearing. Tumors can also become cancerous. These complications are alluded to only early in the film, and they’re never mentioned as a possible danger for Oswald. Just as Oswald’s good nature has magically prevented discrimination, it’s magically banished the degenerative aspects of what’s often a degenerative condition.

While many deaf and disabled people don’t want to be defined as in constant pursuit of a cure, others understandably want, and need, access to medical interventions to help with pain, or prevent loss of function or death. By reducing neurofibromatosis to its (very serious) cosmetic symptoms, and by suggesting that Oswald has overcome even these effortlessly, the movie ends up dinging Edward for wanting a cure, and for being relieved at his miraculous escape from endless rounds of surgery and/or progressive blindness. It accuses a disfigured man of excessive vanity—a form of blaming the victim.

I don’t think this was Schimberg’s intention. Oswald’s immunity to the stigma of his disability is in keeping with the film’s swerve away from realism towards escalating absurdity. The particulars of Edward’s disability peel away like his tumors, and he walks out of the disability story into a new narrative about the possibilities, and dangers, of self-redefinition. Disability is a metaphor.

But disability isn’t (just) a metaphor for a lot of people who’re disabled. A Different Man tries to tell a different story about disability. That’s laudable. But it does that in part by making disabled people disappear—and that’s not a new face for Hollywood at all.