Engrossing but bleak animated study of male mid-life crisis
AT LAST, the misery-fuelled rom-com we’ve all been waiting for. Not for Charlie Kaufman the Pixar-style life lessons smothered in upbeat bounciness. His new release is a bizarre, serious and at times engrossing study of the male midlife crisis.
David Thewlis is the “star” of Anomalisa — although, in truth, that accolade ought to go to the designers behind the stop-start animation. After a 10-year absence, he returns to Cincinatti, by now a successful businessman and the author of a bestselling self-help book for the customer-service industry.
But there’s an emptiness in who he is and what he represents, and what becomes apparent is that he is on a quest. Not to connect to a roomful of strangers but to find a like-minded soul in an ocean of characterless flotsam and jetsam.
He’s lonely, unfulfilled and struck by a harsh realisation: that, while we all strive to be different, we rely upon strangers to show us the “truth” — in his case, how to deal with customers.
We think we’re unique but in reality we are so in awe of the kind of guidance that will transform our lives that we are afraid to think for ourselves, to strive for individuality.
If this sounds a somewhat heavy metaphor for the unthinking digitised world in which we live, where little is learned and everyone is “followed”, then you’d be right. Yet it’s highly inventive, too, something that has continuously marked Kaufman’s writing — think Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich.
In Anomalisa, Kaufman deliberately ensures that all his characters’ faces are derived from the same mould — they look alike and, since they’re all voiced by Tom Noonan (with slightly altered tones) they sound alike, too. Remember the BBC’s chirpy plasticine Morph? Well, in Anomalisa (which could have done with a smidgen of Morph’s irreverence), everything morphs into everything else.
Thus, Thewlis — for whom “everything is boring” — is instantly smitten when he encounters a customer services rep (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who looks, sounds and behaves differently from everyone else. Her name is Lisa and she’s an anomaly — so he calls her Anomalisa. Finally, there is someone just like him out there. Different, and questioning about the consumerism that has consumed our lives.
It’s difficult to be moved by animated images in a decidedly grown-up movie but when Leigh woos him with a version of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (followed by an Italian translation), you’re struck by the tenderness of the scene.
The trouble is there’s not enough of that. And there’s precious little humour and lightness. Perhaps this is Kaufman’s point. It’s bleak out there, made more so by the fact that we’re in danger of losing the individuality that makes us more than an animated figure of someone’s dark imagination.
When you’re going through a midlife crisis, you forget how to enjoy yourself, and yearn for connections that were missed and which will probably never be made. You feel different from everyone else, all of whom seem to lack identifying features.
Kaufman’s spot-on there. I’m just not sure an animated film is the most convincing tool to explore those emotions.