Charlie Kaufman continues his quirky quest to understand the human soul by deploying stop-motion animation.
USA
4*
Directors:
Charlie Kaufman
Duke Johnson
Screenwriter:
Charlie Kaufman
Director of Photography:
Joe Passarelli
Running time: 85 minutes
Michael Stone is big in Cincinnati, for what it’s worth. He is recognised the moment he checks into the city’s “la-di-da” Al Fregoli hotel, as a former flame describes it. Said flame is comically named Bella Amarossi (a very deliberate maiming of the word “amor”). But before we get to her, let’s back up a second to Michael Stone. Stone is a star in the world of customer service and has arrived in Cincinnati to deliver a major speech on the topic; after all, he has written a bestselling book titled How May I Help You Help Them?
Stone is the star of Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation film set in 2005 that marks writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s return to the director’s chair after one of the best début (and arguably one of the most imaginative) films ever made: Synecdoche, New York. Voiced by David Thewlis, the middle-aged, more-salt-than-pepper character is stuck in a world where everyone has the same lily-white voice (one that belongs to Tom Noonan) and different shades of the same face. Everywhere he goes, people have different names, even different genders, but the same voice every time. That is, until he meets Lisa.
Lisa is an anomaly, and Stone cannot believe his luck that he has found such a diamond in a place as uninteresting as Cincinnati, where people cannot stop talking about the city’s zoo and chilli but have absolutely nothing else to recommend. Jennifer Jason Leigh brings her voice to Lisa’s body (it is perhaps a tad disappointing the voice again belongs to a white woman, and the film would have been ever more buzzworthy had it been a little more inclusive), who vividly brings the shy introvert to life.
Before Stone meets Lisa, however, we are treated to a hilarious establishing opening act in which he is haunted by and ultimately faces the woman he dumped for no good reason 10 years earlier, in 1995: the aforementioned Bella. Bella has put her life on hold and never forgiven Stone for leaving her just when they were at their happiest together. Their meeting in a public area is as pitiful as we expect it to be, and Kaufman’s dialogue gleefully thrashes around with cringe-inducing moments of awkwardness that will have many in the audience in stitches.
It is after he gets back to his room on the 10th floor, takes a shower and looks into the mirror that his jaw literally drops: He hears a voice different from all the others, which seemingly causes his cheek to detach from his face – albeit just momentarily. He rushes out of his room, and after knocking on many other doors in the corridor, he finds Lisa, a customer service rep who has come all the way from Akron to hear him speak. When she opens her mouth, her voice is like magic to his ears.
And yet, the film does not pretend that these two are meant for each other in an otherwise dreary, hopeless world. Instead, it digs deeper, very subtly, to direct our attention towards the likelihood that even the most marvellous of experiences – falling in love – can be reduced to crass ephemerality within moments. It is in this process that Kaufman, as he did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, again shows us his cynical curiosity about people’s actions and the way they are tied to our psychological states of mind.
Take the name of the hotel, for example. Most of the film is set inside the fictional Al Fregoli Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. Names in Kaufman-scripted films are often subtle nods at a wider range of references, and in this case, Fregoli undoubtedly refers to the Fregoli delusion or syndrome, a condition that leads people to believe that someone they know changes disguises on a regular basis, instead of realising they are all different people. The connection to the material in this film is obvious although (fittingly) not a true incarnation of the disorder.
The quality of the film is superb, and while the dolls’ faces are deliberately crude, they move about elegantly. Such grace is even more pronounced in the cinematography, as the camera often slowly zooms in on action taking place, and sometimes there are multiples layers of action in a single shot, for which the choreography and the direction are almost too complicated to get one’s head around.
Anomalisa is unlike almost anything else you will have ever seen before. It cleverly draws laughter from the most uncomfortable of situations without ridiculing those involved. It gently reveals the complexity (as well as the humour and the tragedy) that accompanies the act of falling in love. And it has a sex scene that is filled with the clumsiness and uncertainty but also the innocence and desire to satisfy and be satisfied that the first sex act with a new partner often entails.
Although the story is sometimes painfully thin (much of the film takes place during a single night) and some scenes last much longer than they ought to, Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson successfully mine the material for laughs while keeping their collective eye on the ball that is human emotion. This may not be at the same level as his previous works, but Kaufman’s voice remains one that stands out from the others, and for that, we should all expect to fall in love with his work again and again.