Anomalisa is Charlie Kaufman’s loneliest (and smallest) movie yet
Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa doesn’t have the sprawling scope of his last feature, 2008’s Synecdoche, New York. It doesn’t have the same faint glint of hopeful sentimentality as 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Kaufman wrote but did not direct. Anomalisa is something altogether more microcosmic, more self-contained and more lonesome — more of those Kaufman hallmarks than anything else he has written. And a film more lonesome than Being John Malkovich or Adaptation is a lonesome film indeed.
Anomalisa is Kaufman’s seventh film as writer, his second as director, and his first animated feature. Originally penned as a radio play under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli (it’s worth Googling that surname, the better to grasp some of what’s at work here), Anomalisa was funded through a Kickstarter campaign spearheaded by Dino Stamatopoulos, a comedy writer and producer whom Kaufman met when the two wrote together on the short-lived Dana Carvey Show. Co-directed by Kaufman and Duke Johnson (who worked with Stamatopoulos on the stop-motion shows Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, as well as on the “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” episode of Community), it was assembled frame by frame over the course of two years, not counting an additional year of pre- and post-production.
Kaufman and Johnson’s attention to detail is the first thing you notice about Anomalisa. The characters’ 3-D-printed faces are disquietingly human, recognizable from tics to pores, and the sets, built to one-sixth scale, are convincing. But once you adjust to the sheer spectacle of this miniature version of a business traveler’s circumscribed world — airplane, airport, taxi, hotel — it’s the voice performances that emerge as the film’s arresting achievement.
The story centers on Michael Stone, a respected customer-service expert, voiced by David Thewlis. In Cincinnati for a speaking engagement, Stone finds himself plagued on all sides by banality — rambling cabbies, awkward bellboys, even (by phone) his own family. It’s a ceaselessly mundane white noise tonally in keeping with most of Kaufman’s work: ordinary life disproportionately amplified until it’s both painfully funny and breathtakingly forlorn.
Stone’s boredom so thoroughly washes over you that, by the second act, you might not even notice that every other character — Stone’s wife and son, the hotel employees, a sex-shop cashier, everyone — is voiced by just one person: the under-sung character actor Tom Noonan. When this device comes into focus, we discover just how insurmountably defeating this traveler’s plight is. There are only two people in the world — Michael Stone, and everyone else.
Anomalisa dares you to gaze directly into discomfort, as when Johnson and Kaufman pick up the puppet-on-puppet-intimacy torch first lit by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police. Some time after we meet the excruciatingly normal Lisa, a simple and self-
deprecating sales associate from Akron who is scarred both emotionally and physically (voiced brilliantly by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the tone splinters from the merely awkward into the surreal. And surreal, of course, is where Kaufman has always best been able to reveal the depth of his characters’ — and therefore, of course, his own — psyche.
Kaufman does not make light films. Nevertheless, there tends to be a bigness to them, an acknowledgement of the greater world his characters inhabit, with morsels — however scant — of optimism scattered along the path. Anomalisa is small, from its literal physical scale to the brief window of time it inhabits, yet it somehow feels more real than anything else he has done.
Is Anomalisa Kaufman’s magnum opus? No. That remains Synechdoche, a movie he’s unlikely to top unless and until a studio gives the man a budget big enough to render a large-canvas work of such soul-wrenching beauty. But you can still count on this one to break your heart, and break your heart in that way you know is good for you — every once in a while, anyhow.
