Paramount Pictures
There are few writers more cerebral and surreal working in cinema than Charlie Kaufman. He’s become something of a brand for cinephiles, a shortform of what to expect – a movie that’s whip smart, with complexity buttressed by moments of black, sometimes bleak humour. From his collaborations like Being John Malkovich to Adaptation to writing/directing efforts like Synecdoche, NY, his films have been embraced by some and dismissed by others in equal measure.
His latest film is based on a 2005 play and uses stop-motion puppetry to tells a pedestrian yet profound story of finding love in the face of mediocrity. Anomalisa, ostensibly about an anomaly named Lisa and her interactions with the protagonist, may well be Kaufman’s greatest achievement yet, perfectly blending his penchant for the surreal with a relatively straight-forward narrative and providing a perfect collision between both poles.
A tangent: I asked at the Q&A whether Kaufman comes up with the puns first, or if the story leads to these titles. One need not know about boardroom meetings to understand that the likes of Sharknado was title first, plot second, but Kaufman’s titles are so redolent, so provocative that one can imagine the writer sitting around, having the neologism pop to mind, and crafting a story around the concept. Did he connect Schnectady, New York with the literary terminology synecdoche first, or did he twist the meaning after dreaming of his story?
It’s the type of chicken-and-egg philosophizing that’s entirely Kaufmanesque, as the mind reaches for connections and contradictions while watching his work enrich the experience. While I got a non-committal answer, this fan still dreams of some master pun lists of future projects, scrawled ideas like the POE/OPE jotted down by the General in Doctor Strangelove. I can see some room with towering notes, other titles that lead to other films like treasure maps to hidden rooms in the writer’s imagination.
But I digress…
The film’s technical execution is wonderful, with the puppeteered version allowing for many physical gags that obviously differ dramatically from any stage version. The characters themselves show the seams and mechanisms, usually erased in post-production, that help the animators bring the characters to life. Like the bristling fur on the ’33 King Kong that for attuned audiences makes one feel the presence of Dan O’Brien spending months bringing the beast to life, this approach reminds of the frame-by-frame manipulation, the meta-character of the filmmakers quite literally pulling the strings.
David Thewlis does the main voice, and his sad-sack portrayal of the customer service expert Michael Stone is a delight. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lisa, and her soothing speaking voice and delightfully sweet singing tone makes one fall for the character almost immediately. Then there’s the heavy lifting done by Tom Noonan — he’s credited as “everyone else” — who manages in some pretty spectacular ways to make the same timbre of performance take on the most subtle of distinguishing characteristics while still playing to the central conceit.
Kaufman’s co-director Duke Johnson gained nerd cred by working on a stop-motion animated episode of Community, and like Tim Burton/Henry Selick’s collaboration it from the outside looks to be the differences between directing the animated performances versus the narrative components of performance. What’s clear is that this fits firmly into Kaufman’s idiom, even if in the original play he submitted it under a pseudonym.
As we watch the characters grow close together and then drift apart we’re struck by the wondrous minutiae of it all. There’s the latch on the door, the weave of the bathroom robe, quotidian yet poetic, banal but beautiful. Even the lovemaking is a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, one of the more tender scenes of affection you’re likely to see on screens this year, made all the more odd by remembering these are chunks of 3D-printed stuff being caressed by unseen hands at 24 frames/second.
The story is about the novelty of novelty, and one thing that’s thematically consistent is how one is lulled into forgetting for spates of time that these are objects being handled. The performances are wrenching at times, silly at others, with a key-card failing or turndown service taking on operatic levels of interest.
Kaufman was originally reticent to translate his work to animation, but the collision between the ideas in the dialogue and the playfulness of the performances provides a remarkable synergy. Anomalisa is a wonderful treat, a blackly comic, searingly original work about commonplace things.
Profound puppetry indeed.
The Upside: Puppets, puppets, puppets!; steller cast; far more than just the contrivance of its form
The Downside: Your next trip to a hotel room will feel very weird indeed
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