Anomalisa

Director: Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Stars: David Thewlis (Michael Stone), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Lisa Hesselman), Tom Noonan (Everyone else)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Anomalisa
AnomalisaI am a bit mystified by the accolades of “masterpiece” that are being heaped upon Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation drama co-directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. It is a unique film, no doubt, and one that takes a lot of risks and has a number of scenes that work quite beautifully. It has the mordant, awkward bits of humor and wry observation we have come to expect from Kaufman, but not the insight; it’s all surface, which is inadvertently personified by the artifice of the stop-motion animation. The film is supposed to tell us something about human relationships and the conflict between our ideals and our reality, but it’s all muddled, which is what makes its near universal praise by critics so bewildering. Kaufman has certainly earned his share of deserved praise for his inimitable, boundary-pushing screenplays for Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1998) and Adaptation. (1999) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003). But, he’s also hit a few critical bumps along the way, including an earlier collaboration with Gondry, Human Nature (2002), and his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (2008), which divided some critics as to whether it was a masterwork or a mess. Unfortunately, Anomalisa is more of the latter.

The majority of the film takes place in a non-descript upscale hotel in Cincinnati, where Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a published customer service guru on the lecture circuit, has just arrived. A conventionally handsome man in his early 50s who is clearly successful professionally and financially, Michael nevertheless joins the ranks of miserable Kaufman protagonists whose lives are constantly running aground on their own ennui. Although married with a child back in Los Angeles, Michael is unhappy with his place in life and frustrated with his inability to connect with others, which is why he calls up an ex-girlfriend he unceremoniously dumped 10 years earlier for no apparent reason. Potential redemption arrives in the form of Lisa Hesselman (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a conference attendee he meets at the hotel and to whom he is instantly drawn. Severely lacking in self-esteem and poignantly awkward, Lisa is not the conventional object of male desire, but that is precisely what makes her so fascinating (and Michael’s attention so surprising to her). She’s used to being a doormat and a third wheel, but Michael treats her like an angel (the film’s title is a play on words that combines her name with “anomaly,” which is how she describes herself).

Anomalisa actually began in 2005 as a “sound play” Kaufman wrote for composer Carter Burwell’s Theater of the New Ear. The decision to adapt it to film using elaborate, highly realistic stop-motion animation puppets was a risky one, as it puts an inherent layer of artifice between us and a drama that could have easily been played out with human actors. Of course, Kaufman has never been about “easy,” and in collaborating with Duke Johnson, a relatively young stop-motion animation director whose most famous credit is an animated episode of Community, he has attempted to have it both ways: Anomalisa looks nothing like an ordinary drama, but Kaufman and Johnson have designed it so that it will, with the idea being that you will forget you’re watching animated puppets and get lost in the moment. And, at times, that works. But much of the time, it doesn’t.

This isn’t to say that the problems with Anomalisa derive from its being an animated film. Not at all. It is, if anything, a technical triumph and one that illustrates that stop-motion animation can be just as physically and emotionally convincing as any other medium of human expression. The puppets, which were individually designed and printed using 3D printers, are amazingly life-like—almost, but not quite, to the point of being uncanny. For whatever reason they stay just this side of the uncanny valley, that precipitous drop-off where animation that is too life-like becomes just weird.

No, the problems with Anomalisa stem from the two main characters, starting with Michael, who is such a miserable, self-absorbed mope that it is virtually impossible to sympathize with him. Ably voiced by David Thewlis, who adds to the drippy character hints of aggression and annoyance, Michael’s physical ordinariness belies the intensity of his narcissism, which keeps him from connecting with anyone and ensures that he remains miserable and alone, even when surrounded by others. Early on in the film, we become aware that all the other characters—from a chatty cab driver, to the hotel bellhop, to Michael’s wife and son and ex-girlfriend—all have the exact same voice (Tom Noonan’s voice, to be exact). It’s a clever, albeit potentially confusing, means of conveying the sameness with which Michael views everyone around him, which is heightened by the fact that all the faces on the puppets playing the other characters are oddly similar, as well.The key is the name of hotel where Michael is staying: the Hotel Fregoli, a reference to the real-life, but extremely rare Fregoli delusion, a psychological disorder in which a person comes to believe that different people around him are actually the same person in disguise. We aren’t meant to think that Michael actually suffers from this disorder (although he says several times that he feels like something is wrong with him psychologically); rather, it plays as a kind of metaphor for Michael’s interpersonal isolation, which renders everyone around him a single, undifferentiated mass to whom he cannot connect.

Except Lisa. When he hears Lisa’s voice in the hallway after he has gotten out of the shower, he recognizes her as fundamentally distinct from all the others and immediately seeks her out. Metaphorically, then, the uniqueness of Lisa’s voice offers a clever means of differentiating her, but it also has the ill effect of unburdening Kaufman from having to actually write a scene or scenes that explains in human, rather than symbolic, terms why Michael would be so obsessively drawn to the mousy, introverted, awkward Lisa. Jennifer Jason Leigh does a fantastic job voicing Lisa, and she makes her the most interesting character on-screen (which she is clearly meant to be—a loveable oddball). But, the film stalls emotionally because there is never any depth or meaning to Michael’s intense attraction to her. The film is resolutely concrete in depicting his depressive morbidity, but then it gets all abstract when it comes to his propensity for love, which throws everything off-balance. Thus, even the film’s most touching sequence, a rather graphic sex scene that plays fair with the inherent awkwardness of two people who barely know each other getting intimate, doesn’t ultimately work because it has nothing emotional to connect to except an idea—a concept. Thus, it works in isolation, but not in concert with the rest of the film.

It is ironic, then, that Kaufman’s best film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, addressed this very issue when Joel (Jim Carrey), a soft-spoken introvert, attempts to ask out Clementine (Kate Winslet), a fiery, outspoken free spirit with whom he is doomed to have a disastrous relationship. “Too many guys think I’m a concept or I complete them or I’m going to make them alive,” she tells him. “I’m just a f--ked up girl who’s looking for my own piece of mind. Don’t assign me yours.” And therein lies the fundamental problem with Anomalisa: It is little more than the story of an unsympathetic narcissist assigning his piece of mind to a good-hearted oddball. As a romance, it doesn’t work because we just want Lisa to get away from Michael lest he drag her into his sad-sack pit of despair. As an interpersonal cautionary tale it doesn’t work because the film’s attitude toward Michael is so vague. Had it been more clear about what we were supposed to make of his relationship with Lisa—Is it a genuine spark of compatible souls meeting at the wrong time or is Michael just a myopic, misguided jerk with no idea of what he wants?—then Anomalisa might have registered as something more, even if it were just an indictment of its protagonist. As is, it is a stew of potentially interesting ideas brought to life with amazing artistry that can’t quite hide its hollow core.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2)




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