Anomalisa
Directors: Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman
Writers: Charlie Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman (play) (as Francis Fregoli)
Stars: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan
Charlie Kaufman’s scripts and films have always been imaginative, original, and idiosyncratic. Remember “Being John Malkovich” where an office building contains a secret portal into the mind of the actor, or Kaufman’s extremely ambitious, sometimes brilliant, inchoate “Synecdoche” about a despairing playwright who seeks to transcend his life with a grandiose play doomed to failure. Still, despite the uniqueness and complexity of his work Hollywood has often rewarded him by nominating him for four Academy Awards — winning for Best Original Screenplay for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
“Anomalisa” is the second film he has directed or co-directed. Its narrative centers on Michael Stone, voiced here by a Lancashire accented David Thewlis (almost as memorable here as he was in Mike Leigh’s great “Naked”). Stone is a depressed, unhappily married, middle-aged author and inspirational speaker (a touch too ironic). Stone has traveled to Cincinnati to give a talk, and at his hotel meets the unmarried, middle-aged Lisa (a perfectly cast Jennifer Jason Leigh). That may sound mundane, but it’s a Kaufman film, so this time all the characters are blank-faced puppets shot in stop motion animation, except the two leads, who have distinguishing marks — Lisa a scar, Michael some stubble and sunken eyes. But all the subsidiary characters are anonymous and are voiced by Tom Noonan who doesn’t vary his voice from one character to another — irrespective of age and gender.
The fact that all the secondary characters are barely distinguishable from each other strikingly illustrates Michael’s incapacity to connect to anybody outside himself. He’s essentially trapped inside his own head. It also conveys how in most of our encounters we never go beyond our social roles. Michael is a thoroughly alienated man, suffering from depression — especially numbness to all pleasure, passion, and connection.
He sleepwalks through life, barely conscious of his surroundings, but suddenly comes alive when he meets the sweet-voiced, vulnerable Lisa in the hotel’s endless corridor at night. He views this ordinary telesales agent as ”extraordinary” and falls in love with her voice. She is an anomaly for Michael. For though she may be self-deprecating (she reflexively deflects praise and says she is ugly) and lonely, she is much more emotionally intact and able to genuinely connect with other people than the despairing Michael is.
Their meeting leads to a moving and tender sex scene where these two bland-looking puppets are capable of infusing more reality into their making love than most Hollywood scenes involving live actors. The scene is uneasy, awkward, honest, and intimate — none of the sterile, seamless rendering that dominates most Hollywood versions of sex. For the moment Michael is aglow and ecstatic, and has found solace. But by the next morning the depression and disassociation from other people has returned and he finds everything Lisa does and says intensely irritating, and peremptorily drops her.
From then on Kaufman drops even a hint that things will change for Michael. When he gives his pep talk at the self-help conference instead of offering the usual saccharine platitudes he turns it into a cry of existential anguish: “Each person you speak to has had a childhood. Each has a body. Each body has aches. What is it to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive? I don’t know.”
On his return home, Michael is as cut off from his wife and child as he has ever been. The emotionally sensitive and caring moment with Lisa has passed, and he is back in his affectless state.
Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have made a thoroughly melancholy film, devoid of false hopes and happy endings. Their central puppet characters turn out to be more deeply human than most of the people populating Hollywood films. It’s hard to make audiences care about the suffering of puppets, but Kaufman has individuated Michael and Lisa sufficiently to make us feel both their neuroses and their existential plight.
What bothers me is that Kaufman’s minor masterpiece was bypassed for the Best Animated Film Oscar, and “Inside Out” was chosen; the stylish, inventive Pixar animation may be very smart and imaginative, but it’s also cute and self-consciously clever. “Anomalisa,” on the other hand, operates on another level— a vision of fragile, flawed human beings struggling to break out of their solitude. In a way, it’s a puppet version of an Ingmar Bergman film — clearly not quite as psychologically intricate or powerful (whose films are?). Still, profoundly poignant as it is.
