The big strength of the film, anyway, outweighs it: Anomalisa is 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; you could even argue "of all time", if you want to discount Fritz as being an underground production that managed to bubble its way up to mass consciousness. 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 - which, just to recap, includes the fantasies Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the rambling metacommentary of Adaptation. - 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, a sector that considers him something of a living god on the strength of his book How May I Help You Help Them? Michael is not a happy man, a fact omnipresent in every facet of the film: Thewlis's perfectly drained line deliveries, evoking the sound of a man who could do with a good cry and is too tired even fore that; the painfully bland color palette of the film, courtesy of designers John Joyce and Huy Vu; and the universal anonymity of every human Michael comes into contact with, all of them voiced by Tom Noonan - men, women, and children. 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 answer: Lisa, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh in a 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, a keen chronicler of the anomie of depression, would never spin a tale where a sad-sack man is cured of his depression by the love of a Manic Pixie Dream Middle-Aged Woman, and nothing in the texture of Anomalisa suggests that he's interested in changing that.
I find Anomalisa 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, after the fashion of Laika's ParaNorman, lending them an uncanny realism; the same goes for the saggy, floppy bodies of those puppets when we see them in the nude. As we do at some length; besides giving Michael a pathetically farcical shower scene, Anomalisa gives us the most thoughtfully naturalistic sex scene I have ever seen animated, one so attuned to the movements and sounds of sex that 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 (this is used to extremely good effect in a nightmare sequence that is the most overtly Kaufmanesque moment in the film). 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.
I don't love it. "Admirable" is, well, admirable, but try though I might, I've been having an intensely difficult time summoning up any real enthusiasm for Anomalisa as an experience beyond its proficiency as an intellectual exercise. And bear in mind, I didn't like Synecdoche, New York even that much: I found it to be so calculated in its rejection of joy that it become more enervating to watch than remotely enlightening. So your mileage may vary, if you're one of that film's passionate fans. At least Anomalisa has more of a sense of comedy than Synecdoche ever wanted to, but it ends up coming down to the same basic problem: 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.
Anomalisa even goes further in that direction than Kaufman's last film, since the movie presents such a drab, mordant sexual relationship as it its most tender human moment. What it does not do is to side with Michael in viewing Lisa as his savior, thank God; the film realises 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 kind of a suffocating view of humanity, I'm saying, 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), though it has an impressively creative way of re-packaging those insights. In other words, the animation is really damned exciting and I think anyone with the smallest interest in the possibilities of stop-motion storytelling should consider this 100% essential viewing, but this is just 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.
7/10
SPOILERS
ReplyDeleteCopying what a friend told me after seeing the film. It didn't leave much of an impression, but it has grown the longer it lingers, and I do find my friend's theory, however convoluted, intriguing.
Michael suffers a rare psychological disorder called Fregoli Delusion.
The Fregoli delusion, or the delusion of doubles, is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.
This disorder is a subtle fact about Michael as he frequently ponders psychological problems but also the hotel he stays at is called The Fregoli, and also every character has the same voice.
Michael explores his sexual frustration, first with his ex, Bella. He thinks about where she is years after he left her. He looks up her name in a phone book and her full name is Bella Amarossi. I started thinking about her name after thinking of "Anomalisa" and how it's a play on two words, and I realize Amarossi might just be a play on words as well, and the distinction between "Amorous" and "Rossi". The real Bella Michael once dated might have been Bella Rossi, and the word Amorous reveals a very important detail.
Amorous - showing, feeling, or relating to sexual desire.
Michael holds onto old letters from Bella from back when they were together, and he often reads them to re-visualize the memories he's had with her, plagued with guilt over why he left her - but he still wants her under more lusty conditions.
In the sex shop Michael gazes up at a Japanese sex doll, and he's mesmerized by its rustic imperfections. The most prominent and important detail about this doll Michael finds most beautiful is the cracks on the right side of its face, next to its eye. Michael gasps and says "it's so pretty", the first time we caught Michael in the entire film to be taken away by something he finds beautiful. He buys this doll.
Michael is taken away by Lisa's imperfections, and especially that scar on the right side of her face next to her eye, the same position of the crack on the sex doll's face. Michael exclaims one more time how beautiful he finds its imperfections to be.
Michael lets her sing, and while most of the song Lisa sings is about how girls want to have fun, Japanese lyric was squeezed in between her lines as well.
Lisa explains to Michael how she likes the word "anomaly" and how she feels like she herself is one, and that's because she most certainly is one and not someone that actually exists.
Michael's way of creating one is deviating away from having normal sex with another human being to devising a his ideal woman onto a sex doll, whom of which Lisa also has striking similarities to Bella.
This is Michael's perfect woman, and it's something that does not exist. His perfect woman is a combination of past relationships and his fascination to something as cold and mechanical as a Japanese doll.
Michael goes up for his speech, and he has terrible execution...it's almost like he did not properly prepare the way he was supposed to for talking in front of people, and he fumbles miserably. He was too distracted by his own sexual fantasies to do anything remotely productive on his business trip.
His wife resents this site with disgust and yells at Michael that he can do better than that and that he has family that actually care for him.
Michael sits back on the stair steps looking back at the doll one last time as it sings its Japanese tune. The sex doll is the only other thing in the entire film besides Lisa to have a female voice, and that's because that sex doll was Lisa.
One thing I appreciated about this one is that the whole experience turns out to be surprisingly empowering for Lisa. Michael, although the movie is surprisingly sympathetic to him, is objectively a real asshole, completely self-obsessed to the point that he doesn't even acknowledge anyone else's uniqueness. He's self-destructively trying to ruin his own life by cheating on his wife, barely acknowledging his kid, and flubbing his speech, and you think, 'oh great, now he's going to drag this poor naive midwestern lady into his nightmare, too.' But it doesn't work out like that -- he may be a lost cause, but Lisa really just needed someone to treat her like she was special for a moment. If he was using her to fulfill his own neurotic personal needs, it turns out she was able to use him the same way, and much more successfully. It's certainly the closest thing to an optimistic ending in any Kaufman film.
ReplyDeleteI'm not really a fan of Kaufman's esoteric citations; it's interesting to think about the film in terms of the Fregoli delusion after the fact, but it doesn't seem to me that it really plays into the experience of watching the film. With a lot of Kaufman's films, I end up feeling that they fail to speak through visceral appeal (though to their credit they do seem to engender the compulsion to aggressively comb them over for borderline unnoticeable details after they've already seen them).
ReplyDeleteWith this film, I sometimes felt the portrayal of Michael's perspective was too literal, for lack of a better word. A lot of the other characters behave and speak in dumb or transparently self-interested ways, and it's hard for me to watch the movie and take that as a part Michael's perspective rather than part of the film's objective reality. Like it's hard for me to believe that so many lines of dialogue aren't representative of what was actually said? I'm not sure how to put it. And I don't want to complain too much about a film that's so unique.