Movie Review: 'Anomalisa'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Charlie Kaufman's impressive resume is nothing if not distinctive and idiosyncratic.
As the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the writer-director of Synedoche, New York, he has established his unique voice as a moviemaker.
So it should come as no surprise that, for his second outing as a writer-director, he has chosen to move into stop-motion animation with puppets. After all, all fictional characters are puppets of sorts, being manipulated from above or behind. Well, now they're literally puppets.
He's actually the co-director because he shares the directing chair with debuting Duke Johnson on Anomalisa, their stop-motion-animated comedy-drama, which is tonight's opening-night attraction at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
It's based on a play Kaufman wrote in 2005 and features the same cast.
The protagonist is smart, cynical, depressed Michael Stone, a bored customer service specialist and business advice author voiced by David Thewlis, on his way to a conference in Cincinnati as part of his book tour.
Stuck in a marriage that isn't working, he's especially unhappy about his woeful track record in romantic relationships.
He's so depressed and self-absorbed that every single person he meets or encounters has the same exact face and voice (voice courtesy of Tom Noonan).
Well, every single person but one: Lisa, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is in Cincinnati for the conference and whom Michael meets because they're staying at the same hotel.
Because Michael is immediately smitten, he drops his usual defenses like those proverbial hot potatoes.
Why the title? Because Michael sees Lisa as an anomaly. Thus Anomalisa. Hey, it's Charlie Kaufman. And as he always does, he's inviting us inside the mind of the main character. Which is to say, inside our own minds.
The style of the animation might be described as pseudo-realistic, with facial expressions that truly convey the characters' feelings, although we do see the seams connecting the puppets' purposefully false faces – as if they could come apart at any troubling moment.
Anomalisa, which cerebrally but playfully examines existential loneliness and doomed love, is magical in the way that it embraces reality at the same time that it ignores it. But we do come to accept these strung-along characters as people.
And even though Kaufman dwells on the mundane, because we know we're watching puppets and not actual people, just about everything seems freshly observed – including and especially the film's single, intimate sex scene. You read that right.
So we'll mind 3 stars out of 4 for the strangely, stimulatingly downbeat Anomalisa, the latest confession of a dangerous mind from the one-of-a-kind Charlie Kaufman.
