Charlie Kaufman might be too clever for his own good. The
man is an astounding writer. He’s practically conquered his preferred arena of
light pseudo-comedic, psychological drama with things like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation,
and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
And yet I can’t help but think he’s some sort of con man, getting away with
being brilliant in some unseen way. His films walk alongside a dangerous cliff
edge, quite nearly falling into a gigantic pretentious precipice. Luckily his
movies all manage to be real. They speak to real problems real people have in a
very real way, even if his work does delve into the surreal quite a bit.
But now with the stop-motion animated Anomalisa, after getting his feet wet with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, this is Kaufman’s
full creative muscles at work. And the result is something that is truly Kaufman-esque,
for better or worse.
The story is set in 2005 and deals with perpetual sad-sack self-help
writer Michael Stone on a one day trip to Cincinnati to promote his newest book
at a convention for customer-service professionals. Most of the movie takes
place over the course of a single afternoon, night, and morning as Michael
combats his crippling loneliness and psychological problems. Michael’s facing
off against Fregoli delusions, a paranoid disorder in which a person believes
that different people are the same person. The film conveys this by having
famed character actor Tom Noonan voice every single other character besides
Michael, who is voiced by David Thewlis (Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films), and a young woman
he meets named Lisa, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh (most recently Daisy
Domergue in The Hateful Eight).
You really do start to feel sympathy for Michael as he
struggles with having to listen to Tom Noonan’s effectively deadpan delivery
come at him from every direction. However, a lot of sympathy burns into
agitation as Michael also ends up being not a very likable person. My cold,
unfeeling robot heart could only spare so much sympathy for this guy as he
self-destructs. What was needed was a deeper focus in on his condition as a condition. At no point does this film
ever come at Michael’s problems from a professional psychological standpoint
and I feel like it was sorely needed to help build more sympathy. As it stands,
Michael is just a crazy person breaking from reality.
You could be fooled into thinking that this was just about a
guy going through a hefty mid-life crisis, only without the tacky car and
haircut. If I didn’t mention it just now in this review, you’d have no idea
what Fregoli delusions even are. I know I didn’t. At times Michael does come to
realize there’s something wrong with him, but it just isn’t quite enough. As a
character study it still works. Michael is a fascinating person, and his
problems demonstrate the depths of which someone can be crushed by the pressures
of society, but that’s been tackled by everyone, their grandmother, neighbor, dog,
and coffee pot.
By not properly diagnosing his issues, Michael does come
across as a sort of “everyman” figure. You know, just as long as every man is
dissatisfied and unfulfilled in life to the point where everyone starts
sounding like Tom Noonan. I assume if everyone sounds like Jeffrey Tambor or
Fred Ward, you’re still in the clear. In that way, I suppose the lack of the
psychological angle does work.
The animation is something that really helps get the point
across. Fantastic execution of stop-motion aside, it helps build onto Michael’s
long list of problems. The world and the people in it become even more unreal.
But because it’s stop-motion, the
world further slips into the uncanny valley. Like reality television, it is a
realm of near-reality that unsettles the mind. All of the inhuman human beings
Michael interacts with become further inhuman, and Lisa, the only other person
with a voice all her own, becomes more of a real individual. So much character
is given to her in such a short amount of time that the scenes with her become
a saving grace from Michael’s constant moping.
But other than that, the animation goes to waste. There is one particularly note-worthy surreal
sequence where it does come into prominence, but it’s short-lived and doesn’t
go to the full extent of Kaufman weirdness. Animation, in part, helps free the
artist from the confines of reality. Anomalisa
stays rooted in a very real world where the stop-motion is only occasionally
used to great effect. Granted the understated use of it is effective, and my
issue is admittedly a nitpick, but I can’t help but feel like there could’ve
been more done with it.
Compared to the other animated films released this year, Anomalisa is such a curveball it might
as well be from another sport altogether. While it remains one of the most
noteworthy animated films of the year, and it will probably go down in animation
history alongside similar films like A
Scanner Darkly, I can’t call it one of the best. I’m not going to throw
this movie a parade of roses like other critics just because it has emotional
depth and conveys it using stop-motion actors. Lost in Translation did what this movie was doing, only better, and
it didn’t feel the need to make a Bill Murray puppet.
Anomalisa drags and
I’m not impressed by its use of animation. I know Kaufman and company made this
outside of the big studio system with Kickstarter, but that doesn’t excuse its
complete lack of empathy towards its own artform. Now I’m not saying this
somehow makes me smarter than other, professional critics—oh, wait, that’s
exactly what I’m saying. Anomalisa is
pretty good and it’s definitely worth seeing, but it isn’t worth bending over for it and shaking your butt in the air like a stray cat in heat.
Score: B-
