I love Charlie Kaufman about as much as it's possible to love someone you've never met. His films - particularly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but also Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich - have had a bigger impact on the way I write than those of almost any other writer. Whenever it comes to explorations of the mind, the personality, and the ways, both conscious and subconscious, in which we respond to art, there are few minds out there who can respond with such stunning insight.
So when I say that Anomalisa is one of the best films Kaufman's ever made, you'd better believe I mean it. And it's strange to say that because, in spite of its material appearance, it's one of his most unapproachable works yet. The story centres around Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a customer service expert who's flown to Cincinnati to give a talk about his latest book. Thing is, Stone's going through a midlife crisis, so he perceives everyone around as the same person, with the same voice. Oh, did I forget to mention it's a stop-motion animation? That's quite important. The characters - while altogether more detailed than, say, their Wallace and Gromit brethren - are crafted in a way that draws attention to the facial masks they're wearing, which sport cracks around the edges and across the eyes. Everyone bar Michael is wearing the same mask, and all of them are voiced by that terrifically unnerving character actor, Tom Noonan.
Well, almost all of them. Restless in the hotel he's staying in, Michael suddenly hears a different voice. He sprints along the corridor, knocking on doors, until he finally comes across a room occupied by two women. One of them is called Lisa, and is voiced with heartbreaking inelegance by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Michael, asserting himself with an almost predatory confidence, buys them drinks, then invites Lisa back to his hotel room.
I mentioned that this film is quite unapproachable, and it's not just because of the stop motion - though that is a part of it. Rather, we're asked to view the world through Michael's eyes. And Michael isn't necessarily the nicest guy in the world. He's narcissistic, self-involved, and capable of quite ruthless cruelty. Spending time with him is uncomfortable, to say the least, because we're afraid of what he might do to people, what kind of havoc he might cause in his vulnerable, self-destructive state.
But that's the genius of the film. The stop motion conceit is one of the best renderings of the subjective experience that I've ever seen. We never forget that people are puppets, and therefore, we never really empathise with them - just like Michael. We get sick of Tom Noonan's voice so quickly, we find anyone who's speaking with it intensely annoying - just like Michael. And when Jennifer Jason Leigh comes along, we're desperate to hear her speak, and sing, that we're completely willing to ignore her flaws - just like Michael.
And then, well, there's the sex scene. Destined to rank alongside Don't Look Now in the hall of the all-time greats, the moment when Michael and Lisa become intimate is simultaneously unreal, surreal, and, in spirit, more real than anything else out there. It's deeply uncomfortable, and feels like it lasts for eons, but there's real beauty in it - like we're seeing humanity stripped back to its most vulnerable, exposed essence. The film attains tragic proportions the morning after, when Leigh's voice is suddenly overlayed by Noonan's, and we realise that, for Michael, the spell has worn off. He's bored of her, and he's doomed to remain unhappy.
There's an argument to be made that the conceit works best in its original state, as a "voice play". (Apparently, the actors would sit on stage and read their lines while sound effects were played around them, leading to some Brechtian-based LOLs.) But it's the visuals that transforms this film into something beautiful. I've always thought that animation is better at capturing the essence of life than live-action cinema - if cinema is a medium for transforming life into something meaningful, then surely the greatest purity can be achieved by a complete breaking from reality? In Anomalisa, something as simple as walking down a corridor becomes something magical, simply because of its precise, and otherworldly, execution. I loved it.
★★★★★
