giuseppe andrews

Bronze is a down on his luck thespian who needs a break badly. Literally living off his one recognizable moment in the TV cop show Boys in Blue (he played a TV stealing criminal), he spends his days hustling, his nights arguing with his live-in companion, a transvestite Christian rock wannabe. After a beer can robbery goes wrong, Bronze gets his songwriting pal an audition. When that falls through, he hits rock bottom. A bout with cellphone-induced ear cancer and an incident with a haphazardly thrown can of soup seals his sad fate.

As character studies go, Actor is a classic case of talentlessness and temptation. Miles Dougal delivers a killer performance as a wayward young performer, lost in a world of missed opportunities and unlikely alliances. He’s a journeyman who has watched luck pass by him time and time again. Auditions go poorly and get rich quick schemes stumble before they even start. While Bronze bellyaches quite a bit about his sorry lot in life, he does seem stricken by a dark cloud of misfortune. There is a sequence near the middle when he tells the story of a racehorse that could have been his, had he simply followed his gut reaction. Instead, he rejected the offer and ended up kissing away the keys to Easy Street. Similarly, his inability to keep his ego in check results in a disastrous audition/performance by his cross-dressing companion. Andrews digs deep here, using obvious scatology and skewed symbolism to illustrate the standard Tinseltown riches-to-rags (or perhaps better put - nominal-to-nothing) tale.

As he does with all of his movies, Andrews finds the roles that best fit his accomplished group of amateur cast members and then allows them to deliver his deliberate dialogue with off the page/cuff cleverness. Trailer park titans Walt Dongo and Tyree are especially effective as the sexually ambiguous rocker and a casting agent who needs closure for a particularly troubling onset relationship. Andrews constantly screws around with gender identity and clarity. We often wonder if the characters portrayed are gay, straight, somewhere in between, or utilized like they were in ancient Greek theater (men playing women, for example). But this is Dougal’s film, and it rises and falls on his tour de force efforts. We don’t always sympathize with Bronze, but we definitely understand his downward spiral. The end events, hinted at throughout the film, highlight just how far into the limelight landfill Hollywood will drive a struggling cinematic cast-off - and if he’s anything, this bad actor is a true piece of celluloid refuse.

-Bill Gibron

80 min.