I’m a gigantic Charlie Kaufman fan. He’s the writer behind BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and ADAPTATION. And he was the writer/director of SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK. Much of his work has an air of existentialism, and a certain disdain for the tropes employed by most screenwriters. It is also weird as hell, but usually in a thrilling, and at times genius way. There is a kind of relatable absurdity to his work that often plays with the mundane, yet reveals profound truths.
I’d been hearing good buzz about his latest, ANOMALISA, which he co-directed with Duke Johnson, at the Toronto Film Festival. I had not heard of co-director Duke Johnson going in, but he directed the stop-motion episode of COMMUNITY, Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas, as well as many episodes of the stop-motion TV series MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENHOLE. I deliberately didn’t read anything about it so that I could go in blind. I knew to expect the unexpected, but wow, I still wasn’t prepared for ANOMALISA. It is personal, intimate, detailed, at times boring, at other times fascinating, and of course nontraditional. Oh and there is puppet sex. In fact, the whole film is stop-motion animation, albeit a remarkably fluid and realistic one. And instead of using this to show fantastic details, they use it largely to illustrate the minutiae and monotony of a business trip.
Maybe the best shorthand way to describe ANOMALISA is THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX meets LOST IN TRANSLATION. MR. FOX for the amazing stop-motion work, but LOST IN TRANSLATION for the out-of-place traveler making a personal connection. Of course that still doesn’t capture the Kaufmaneqse nature of the proceedings.
The plot of ANOMALISA is pretty simple — we open on Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) in an airplane, on the way to give a speech about his business productivity book. We follow him as he takes a taxi, checks into his hotel, calls his family, and meets up with an ex-lover at the hotel bar. No mundane detail is spared, from his conversations with the desk clerk to him taking a piss. There is a certain amount of fascination in that this world is exquisitely realized in miniature, and yet there is an extraordinary amount of ennui. This is a deliberate choice — the protagonist is bored with his life, and this is being communicated to the audience by boring them too. It is bold, and it works at what it is trying to achieve, but it kind of turned me off too. Of course, this being Charlie Kaufman, plenty of these interactions are nonsensical and hilarious, and even the boring ones, when taken in quantity, add up to something more profound. There’s another bold choice too. Aside from the main character, and a character we meet later, all the characters have a similar appearance and the same male voice (Tom Noonan), no matter whether they are male or female. It is kind of off-putting, but again there is a thematic reason for this. Only when Michael meets the character Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) does he start to see the world in a different way.
While watching ANOMALISA, I have to say I was a bit nonplussed. I kept waiting for something amazing to happen. And the thing is, there are glimpses of this. Occasionally there is a development that breaks the self-consistency of that universe, and a character realizes it. You think for a minute that things is about to implode in on itself in a Kaufman-level avalanche of self-introspection. And yet, those tantalizing moments just hang there, ultimately unresolved.
Ultimately, ANOMALISA is about love, the fleeting nature of it, and our tendency to get bored by the routine. It explores these themes in a fascinating and original way. And yet, it just isn’t riveting. And then again on the other side, I can’t stop thinking about it. It is a great festival movie. It isn’t going to put mainstream popcorn-eating asses in the seats, but it will give you endless fodder for discussion.
- Copernicus (aka Andy Howell). Email me or follow me on Twitter.
