And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Unapologetically attractive
Anomalisa (2015)
A masterpiece about the human condition – with puppets
Charlie Kaufman achieves further artistic greatness with this hilariously funny and horribly real animation about the unbearable loneliness of being.
Is it about a man having a midlife breakdown? Or is this the breakdown itself? Is this film just one long hallucinatory symptom of cognitive disorder? David Thewlis voices Michael Stone, an expatriate Brit in the US who has made a name and career for himself writing motivational books about customer service. He’s in Cincinnati to give a speech on this subject – a little like George Clooney’s sleek character in the Jason Reitman comedy Up in the Air. But so far from being a dynamic or charismatic individual, Michael is clinically depressed: small, cowed. He is numbed and alienated from the world.
This is partly because Cincinnati has bad and guilty memories for him. It was here that, 10 years before, Michael broke up with his long-term girlfriend Bella in a spasm of commitment-phobic panic he still can’t explain to himself, and he wonders if he ought to call her up for a drink while he’s in town to apologise. His self-doubt and self-hate extend to his current relationship (he is married with a son) and to relationships in general. Yet while he’s in the hotel, Michael has an intense encounter with a besotted fan: a call-centre worker called Lisa. They have a conversation about the word “anomaly” and how it applies in an illusory way to all of us. Everyone thinks they are anomalous; different from everyone else and special. Michael nicknames Lisa “Anomalisa”. Is this a cruel if unintentional joke at her expense?
Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa, but every other character apart from Michael – from the blandly complaisant hotel receptionist to Michael’s variously testy and furious wife and ex-girlfriend – is voiced by Tom Noonan. This is partly what gives the film its dreamlike buzz. It lets you feel Michael’s vertigo of existential fear.
Anomalisa doesn’t have to exert itself to be strange, although everything about it is unforgettably, skin-crawlingly strange, especially the banal boringness of dull things, painstakingly created in this puppety universe. The simple experience of checking into a hotel and then going up in the lift and walking into your room is shown in real time: Kaufman and his co-director and animator Duke Johnson make it as riveting as any thriller. And the film brilliantly responds to the phenomenon of the hotel room itself: flavourless, corporate, dull, like the room service menu – but, like that menu, liberating and delicious in its lack of identity. One of the most fascinatingly bizarre moments comes when Michael is looking out of his window and sees a man in the building opposite masturbating to images on his computer. The man looks sharply up and it is Michael who looks guiltily away.
Like Kaufman’s screenplays for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, Anomalisa is about the mysterious prison of identity and consciousness, the need to be freed from this prison by love, and the sickening pain of unrequited passion or post-coital letdown that reveals this hope to have been an illusion. Eight years ago, Kaufman directed another extraordinary film, Synecdoche, New York, about a yearning for artistic greatness. Kaufman achieved it then – and he achieves it again now. Is there anyone else in the movies doing such unique and extraordinary work?
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