Review: Anomalisa
Friday, January 1, 2016 at 2:00PM 
Tim here. The biggest strength of Anomalisa is that it's the most prominent, prestigious animated feature made in the U.S. for an exclusively adult audience in ages and ages. Since Fritz the Cat, probably; maybe even of all time. The film is the brainchild of Charlie Kaufman, who initially wrote it as an audio-driven stageplay performed by the same cast as the movie; he turned it into a stop-motion feature with the help of co-director Duke Johnson, a veteran of the dark Adult Swim satire Moral Orel. Oddly, it's perhaps the least outré film of Kaufman's career, despite being animated. Or maybe it's exactly the dirty trick of the movie that Kaufman's most ruthlessly realistic story ever would also be the one that is the least objectively "real" of all of them.
That story centers on Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a melancholy author traveling to Cincinnati to give the keynote speech at a conference for customer service representatives. Michael is not a happy man, a fact omnipresent in every facet of the film, from Thewlis's perfectly drained line deliveries, those of a man who could do with a good cry and is too tired even for that, to the painfully bland color palette of the film. [More...]
It's present as well in the universal anonymity of every human Michael comes into contact with, all of them voiced by Tom Noonan. This last gimmick is both the film's most feisty stylistic touch and its most impressively unconventional gesture, and the shading Noonan gives to the whole universe of characters is the year's most unexpected great performance.
All of this adds up to Michael being awfully tired of life, and right about midway through the brisk 90-minute film comes his possible salvation: Lisa, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her performance is tremendously energetic and cringingly awkward performance that's utterly without fear in painting her friendly, pleasant character as rather banal and not very bright. Michael doesn't see it that way: she's the first person he's encountered since God knows when who challenges or surprises him in any way, and after clumsily asking her to sleep with him, he's ready to leave his wife and child to start a new life with her. Meanwhile, the audience waits for the other shoe to drop: Kaufman is too keen a chronicler of the anomie of depression to think it can be cured that easily.
Anomalisa is enormously admirable: it's the first mainstream animated film in America in just ages that aggressively tries to re-orient our expectations of what kind of stories are "appropriate" for animation. And the approach it takes to animation is, itself, decidedly unconventional. The faces of the stop-motion puppets were created on 3-D printers, lending them an uncanny realism. The same goes for the saggy, floppy bodies of those puppets when we see them in the nude: Anomalisa gives us the most thoughtfully naturalistic sex scene ever animated, one deeply attuned to the movements and sounds of sex. It's striking and disorienting because that kind of sensitivity about sex is rare in movies, not because it's a depiction of doll cunnilingus.
These hyper-real puppets, meanwhile, have been assembled with deliberate artlessness: the seams in the component parts of the face are left to stand, giving every character the impression of wearing a plastic mask. The tension between this insistent reminder that we're always only looking at maquettes being manipulated by hand, and the insistent realism of every other aspect of the design and cinematography provides a steady source of discord that Anomalisa thrives on: it is, when we come right down to it, a depiction of soul-consuming depression, the kind that makes it feel not just impossible but undesirable to bother connecting with any other human beings. Presenting a world that's both totally real and obviously constructed is a hell of a way to explore that feeling.
"Admirable" it is, but what beyond that? At least Anomalisa has more of a sense of comedy than Kaufman's last film, Synecdoche, New York ever wanted to, but like that film, this is a story about a man so consumed by self-negation that there's really nothing left about him that's terribly interesting or appealing, and we're left with very little reason to desire spending time in his presence. The film doesn't side with Michael in viewing Lisa as his savior, thank God; it realizes that Michael is just being a deeply pathetic middle-aged white guy in thinking he can patch himself up with the help of an extra-marital fling, though in order to prove that realises this, it has to make sure that we get that Lisa is frankly not very interesting or distinctive. Which, Leigh's fireworks show of a vocal performance notwithstanding, means that we're stuck with a two-hander in which one of the hands is unlikable and skeevy and the other hand is basically a dolt with no real life of her own.
It's a suffocating view of humanity, and not one with terribly new insights into middle-aged male behavior (there have been a lot of Michaels in the movies over the years). Its creative aesthetic is entirely worthy of every sort of praise, but this is ultimately a beleaguered tale of life in a crappy world. There simply isn't very much there there, and what there is is frankly so pessimistic as to be of limited utility.
Rating: B
Reader Comments (6)
How much does a film critic's need to make notes while watching a movie and their need to write an insightful review about whatever they're watching influences their experience actually watching the movie? Why is it I felt this was the case here?
God bless your reviews, Tim.
Tim is the best
I hated this film so much, I can't imagine ever hating a film more. Every time I've watched a film since this one I think "No matter what, it will at least be better than Anomalisa." It gives me some comfort. Life is too short to watch another film about The Struggles Of Middle-Aged White Man.
I know it's a rarity, but there's also Waking Life/Scanner Darkly. So not "ages" long ago.
Tim - your review gives such a great summary of why I am so tired of these types of films. Also, after watching "Synecdoche, New York", I vowed I would never watch another Charlie Kaufman film again. But films like these (Sideways, Her, etc) always get such great critical reviews.
It's really nice to see someone being honest for once about this cultural archetype.
Btw, just in case I sound humourless, I watched "Alan Partridge,Alpha Papa" and laughed the whole way through. If I'm going to watch a dissatisfied middle aged man at least have a sense of humour and proportion.