Dana Culling reviews the spectacular Anomalisa.
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| Just wondering if YOU brought protection? |
We come to Anomalisa
expecting a love story. But this is
not the tale of two people who meet by chance in a hotel and fall in love with each
other, and it is neither particularly inspiring nor heartwarming. In fact,
Charlie Kaufman’s latest film could best be described as a stop-motion
psychological horror movie – an existential tour
de force which questions the very threads of reality, and how they connect
or sever the bonds people weave between one another.
This is a story about artifice, about intense loneliness
and the solipsism inherent in the daily social machinations of a character so
insular, so entrenched inside his own mind that his every effort at social
interaction becomes painful and steeped in disappointment – precisely because
his needs to reach out far outweigh his ability.
The film’s protagonist, Michael Stone, voiced with an
aching adeptness by David Thewlis with a strange mix of detachment and pathos,
is ostensibly a self-help guru on a mission to spread his wisdom to a
conference of sales representatives in 2005 Cincinnati. But underneath the
quiet, genteel façade of the competent public speaker is a man driven mad by
his own alienation from everyone around him; he is an island in a sea of voices
which all sound alike – and, indeed, all belong to Tom Noonan, who voices every
other character regardless of age or gender. All of Michael’s social exchanges
are filtered through his aloofness; it is not until he hears a different voice
that he begins to crumble inwardly in a truly frightening way.
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This voice belongs to Lisa, expressed with a charming,
ordinary awkwardness by Jennifer Jason Leigh. She represents an otherness that refreshes Michael’s
hopes, but what he tells himself – and Lisa– is love, only amounts to an
illustration in the very ways he has come to rely on his barriers to push other
people away. The closer he comes to something truly extraordinary with Lisa,
the deeper she seems to begin to sink into his own solitary actuality.
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| Can't you see I'm crying clay tears over here? |
The use of puppet animation in this film is nothing short
of symbolic brilliance; the farther into Michael Stone’s mind we reach, the
more obvious it becomes that this is a man who doesn’t feel human, and doesn’t
really see the rest of the people around him as being part of their own
stories. He has distanced himself nearly completely from everyone; his mental
soliloquies play out like a series of masks on a mannequin, and Lisa’s is the
only voice Michael truly hears.
Lisa herself is an ‘anomaly’, simply because she is herself – and, as such, is the perfect
example of why Michael has failed to find happiness in his marriage or with his
young son, or even in his feeble attempt to reconnect with his old flame. Michael
is, in essence, a puppet controlled by no one, isolated in a world full of
living dolls and meaningless voices. He is stuck inside his own reality, unable
to find human connection because he has made himself so thoroughly inaccessible
that his loneliness drives him to nearly complete self-containment.
Score:
-Dana Culling