Review: Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman, the acclaimed screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, once again explores the theme of interiority and the minefield of human relations. This time it’s in collaboration with Duke Johnson in a stop motion comedy-drama and bizarre love story about a man in the midst of a midlife crisis.

Michael Stone, a celebrity in the world of customer service (David Thewlis), feels alienated and bored with life. Having travelled to Cincinnati to deliver a speech at a seminar, he has a stilted phone conversation with his wife, child, and a failed reunion with an old girlfriend—whom he walked out on years ago—at his hotel.

It is here that he is suddenly enchanted by the passing voice of the giggly, self-deprecating super-fan, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), in which he sees something extraordinarily beautiful. She is the only one able to reach Michael in a world of monotonous, colourless mundanity; an anomaly… Anomalisa.

Anomalisa is a perfect exploration of internalised, depressive isolation as Michael’s view of society is a mass of faceless faces where everyone—besides one other solely ‘special’ person—looks and sounds so tediously similar, as Tom Noonan’s perfectly bland tone voices every other character besides Michael and Lisa.

As Michael suffers the dreariness of his stay in the featureless ‘luxury’ hotel room, Kaufman’s ironic humour wittily exposes the customer service industry with its hollow attempts to suit the needs of every ‘individual’ whilst following the same dehumanised script for the masses, thereby examining the concept of independence within an artificial society on a larger scale, with an (actual) set of mindless, manipulated puppets. It is with this trademark cynicism that Kaufman critiques the romantic notion of ‘soulmates’, as Michael is self-absorbed, dismissive, and, at times, mentally imbalanced. His relationship with Lisa ultimately forces us to question whether a supposedly shared and meaningful connection with another person is simply founded on a naïve fantasy of our own narcissistic envisioning—one that is potentially destructive.

The puppetry is visually mesmerising as Michael and Lisa display every facet of human emotion with endearing, tormented intricacy through what is a sewn-on mask of a face, brought to life only through a series of pictures. As a huge fan of stop-motion, I have always found it a delightful and sadly underused medium, but also rather disturbing.

Those familiar with such classics as Coraline and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride may recognise the haunting, adult quality of these macabre and uncanny spaces, where the figures are human-but-not-quite; both real and robotically surreal with controlled movements and expressions that call into question our very authenticity as humans. Hence—into what was originally a live ‘sound-play’ with the same cast—this animation adds all the more poignancy to Kaufman’s concept, avoiding its usual pigeonhole of children’s psychedelic dark-fantasy.

The film does have its moments of wild surrealism where Michael’s identity and psychological stability become—literally—dislodged, as words dissolve into mechanical ticking and half of the puppet’s face falls off in a physicalised existential panic. This is impressively original in its self-reflexive treatment of stop-motion animation, reinforcing that clever, unnerving comment on the fragility of human identity.

The foray into mental disorder, for me, however, steered too far away from the sympathetic realism of the film. Such sequences as Michael’s erratic speech—which descends into an odd political rant—and his paranoid nightmare especially, don’t completely work. They appear a little too disjointed and take a lot of unpacking to be altogether enjoyable, at least for the first viewing.

Indeed—whilst this was presumably the whole point—I found that the realtime scenes and much of the comedic moments rather laboured, with varying degrees of vulgarity that didn’t really fit with the film’s central pathos, and with such a profound concept, the dialogue often fell flat. Audiences will no doubt feel deflated by the abruptness and disappointment of the ending but, in some ways, therein lays its tragic and all too lifelike genius.

3/5