Anomalisa – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson

Starring: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan

Anomalisa, writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s first film since 2008’s sprawling Synecdoche, New York, must surely be the apotheosis of the mid-life crisis subgenre.  The story follows Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a depressed self-help author, through his stay at a sterile Cincinnati hotel, where he encounters Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a self-effacing woman who stirs long-dormant feelings within him.

The film (co-directed with Duke Johnson, and based on Kaufman’s own play) doesn’t stint on the signifiers of middle-aged male frustration with a mundane world.  The expected bugbears of clinging women, mindless and/or overbearing service workers, and wilfully user-unfriendly technology are all present and correct, as are the expected jibes against fatuous small-talk and the musical tastes of those less sophisticated than our hero.  What makes Anomalisa different is that the very form of the film works to expose each of these tropes as juvenile – because Anomalisa is not just the ultimate mid-life crisis film, it is also one of the most gorgeous animated films of recent years.

Rendering Stone’s disaffection with stop-motion puppets has the effect of transforming every character into a doll.  Although Stone and Lisa are more differentiated, every other character has essentially the same face – and all are voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan.  The effect is that of a child ‘casting’ toys in an exteriorisation of his own fantasies and frustrations – a closing of the gap between childhood and adulthood that reveals the stubborn infantilism of the latter.  The infantilising tendencies of male sexuality are made particularly explicit in the film, as when Stone visits a sex toy shop, and appears initially unable to distinguish it from a children’s toy shop.  On the one hand, the suggestion is that Stone’s deep depression has numbed him to the specificities of what surrounds him; on the other, Kaufman reveals the child-like object fixation that governs adult sexual ‘play’, and that informs his own film.  As with sex toys, Anomalisa uses simulacra of flesh to make a fantasy real – speaking in the process of what can be the profoundly isolating experience of the disconnected fantasist.

The animation is beautifully rendered.  When the puppets appear naked (which is quite often), they have a marvellous frailty – somehow more human for not being human.  At the same time, much of the film’s considerable humour is mined from the implacability of fixed puppet expressions, as they go about their mundane routines like crash-test-dummies brought to life.

The voice performances are also striking.  Noonan’s contribution is both hilarious and eerie – often in the same moment.  The wounded-child quality that Leigh has always possessed finds its perfect home in Lisa.  When Lisa speak-sings ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, unaccompanied, in a quiet hotel room, Leigh gingerly emphasises the last consonant of each word, as if simply getting from one end of the word to the other feels like a feat of daring.

Much has been made of Anomalisa’s script, possibly on account of its stage origins, and because Kaufman is still best known for his 1999 script for Being John Malkovich.  Anomalisa is a finely written film, written with great and wry detail.  However, what makes the film great is neither the writing nor the enchanting technique with which it has been brought to life.  The greatness of the film emerges from the space between the writing and the technique, and how each comments upon and changes the other.  It’s what happens in this in-between space that pushes Anomalisa beyond the territory of the merely ‘clever’ and into the realm of the richly, and troublingly, alive.