Audley's delivery recalls the stylized performances of old screwball comedy in certain ways. Comic timing is all about withholding, and Audley takes withholding to extremes, making conversation out of indirection, using only the words most people throw out in an effort to make themselves understood. His performance in Team Picture is so incredibly precise in its indirection that you don't think of it as a performance at all, adding to the confusion between real and unreal. He isn't interested in playing other people, he recently said, but read any interview with him online and you'll see, by contrast, how accomplished his acting here truly is, and what a highly specialized expression of his personality it is, meaning that it conveys several aspects of who he might be to heightened effect. When called upon to explain himself or articulate his ideas, Audley does so with admirable intelligence and a specificity which would leave his character in Team Picture staring blankly back at him. Actors are always playing other people. Conversely, even when they're playing Shakespeare, they're playing themselves, drawing on who they are and how they feel and their wealth of experience. Cassavettes played plenty of other people on screen, getting closer and closer to who he was off camera.

Team Picture reminds of Beckett, Antonioni, and even Woody Allen more than Cassavettes, for that matter. It plays with silence and space, action and inaction, in ways Antonioni explored, moves ahead through sidelong steps and speaks in a coded, highly stylized language, like Beckett. Your mind works within those spaces in some fairly interesting patterns. Audley's performance has the neurotic indecisiveness of Woody Allen on barbiturates. It's amazing to watch, and makes me excited to see what he's capable of, as Kentucker Audley or someone else; as anyone at all. His facial expressions recall the silent cinema of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. His awareness of gesture, conscious or intuitive, is similar to theirs. None of these comparisons could possibly please someone intent on playing himself. Audley might prefer not think of himself as a dancer either.

 
Read more of Pera's writing on film at his blog Intermittent Movement.