"ANOMALISA" by Charlie Kaufman (Fantastic analysis)

             Kaufman’s newest film Anomalisa made its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over the weekend, and we have rounded up the early buzz. The film is notable not only because Kaufman’s involvement but it is the auteur’s first stop-motion film. The story is about “a man crippled by the mundanity of his life”. Three weeks ago, Charlie Kaufman was pacing anxiously around a green room at the Palm Theater in Telluride. Just a few feet away, "Anomalisa," his first directing effort in seven years, screened for only the second time during the weekend festival. It was a big moment.

Here is the description of the film:

"Fasten your seatbelts. Michael Stone, spending the night in a Cincinnati hotel on business, is beset by a dramatic stream of insane and intense characters. Just before he spirals into desperation, he finds escape through a surprising, astonishingly tender erotic encounter. If the preceding description seems enigmatic, it’s because revealing anything more might spoil the intricate, tragicomic dreamscape created by Charlie Kaufman (SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK) and Duke Johnson (the Adult Swim series “Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole” and “Moral Orel”). ANOMALISA is animated, with wondrous stop motion; David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh and the gifted Tom Noonan do the voice honors, superbly; and Carter Burwell’s string-based score is perfect. We know Charlie Kaufman’s status as a visionary and one of the American filmmakers who really matters; we can now discover Duke Johnson as a major creative force."

              In “Anomalisa,” an inspirational speaker in crisis checks into Cincinnati’s (fictional) Al Fregoli hotel, named for a delusional condition in which paranoiacs believe that those around them are not who they appear to be, but a single tormentor hiding behind multiple disguises. That’s a helpful bit of trivia to consider before entering into Charlie Kaufman’s latest brainteaser, this one originally mounted (just twice) for composer Carter Burwell’s “Theater of the New Ear” sound-play experiment and rescued from obscurity by a team of imaginative producers who thought it might make an interesting stop-motion project — which it does, exceptional even, although it’s unclear just who they imagined might be the audience for such a cerebral cult offering.

                What follows is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and ultimately unforgettable. Kaufman has done it again, writing a deeply flawed male protagonist and a woman who seems so incredibly ideal despite (or perhaps due to) her imperfections, and he’s engineered it so that we fall in love: Michael’s gray and overcast, Lisa just wants to walk in the sun, and for as long as he can make the moment last, she’s the one. The anomaly. The Anomalisa. 

           

                Halfway through Anomalisa everything comes together - why there’s such a limited voice cast, why the stop motion puppets have visible seams on their faces, what the hell is going on at all - and I got goosebumps. I all but levitated out of my seat as I understood what Charlie Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson were doing with the film, and what had already been an incredibly personal, deeply human story became absolutely profound, sad and painfully true.

               At first it seems like the stop motion nature of the film is a gimmick; after all, most of the movie takes place in a hotel and is a series of scenes between people talking. You could make this movie with human beings, and with a fraction of the effort. Except that you can’t, and what seemed like a weird tic at first - all but the lead puppet has the same face, every character but the lead is voiced by Tom Noonan - becomes the central driving metaphor of everything. It’s perfectly Kaufmanesque in that it’s a surrealism that is completely in service of story, emotion and a powerful theme.