” Anomalisa” unsettling, heartfelt
6665Drama. R. 93 min.
There’s a special place in movie heaven for Charlie Kaufman. The writer of such beguiling mind trips as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”— who made his directorial debut with the confoundingly gnarly “Synecdoche, New York”— Kaufman represents something rare in filmmaking: genuine originality.
Cerebral, sensitive, sometimes excruciatingly erudite, he’s a philosopher king among denominator- lowering commoners. He’s high- minded, which would be obnoxiously off- putting were it not for the note of tender melancholy that graces his work like a pale, just- bloomed bruise.
With “Anomalisa,” Kaufman engages in yet another feat of sad and satirical fantasy about people trying to get out of their own heads. As the film opens, a customer-experience expert named Michael Stone is flying to Cincinnati to attend a professional convention and flog his new book, “How Can I Help You Help Them?”
On the plane, in the taxi from the airport, at his upscale hotel, Michael submits to the usual small talk. Judging from the way people look at him in the hotel lobby, he’s something of a minor celebrity. He makes his way to his room, fiddles around with the phone, orders room service and looks out the window into the featureless night.
So far, so banal. Except that Michael is portrayed by a marionette- like puppet, as is every other character in “Anomalisa.” What’s more, those supporting players all have the same face and share a flat, similarly affectless voice that resembles Jimmy Fallon at his most soft- spoken.
“Anomalisa” pivots around a chance meeting that Michael ( voiced by British actor David Thewlis) has with another traveler, a woman named Lisa, who— unlike the great wash of anonymous faces and voices around him— manages to connect with Michael on another, movingly specific level. As voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lisa is a vivid, poignant character, a woman whose insecurity and awkward sense of humor elicit almost immediate protective sympathy. Her a capella version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” followed by perhaps the most disarmingly honest sex scene in the history of puppetry, brims with equal parts strangeness and sincerity.
Both Thewlis and Leigh play it absolutely straight as “Anomalisa” unfolds and viewers are invited to speculate on what it all means. At first, the filmmakers seem to be wittily illustrating Michael’s own narcissism, with everyone who’s not him taking on the same generic blandness. But an encounter soon after his arrival in Cincinnati suggests that the conceit may have more to do with obsession, guilt and unresolved remorse.
Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self- conscious artifice: the unsettling question of just what it is that’s pulling our strings, and who can possibly love us despite our obvious cracks.