Review: Artsy realism for animated 'Anomalisa'
In writer Charlie Kaufman’s capable filmmaking hands, the puppets of Anomalisa deftly showcase the romantic beauty and utter monotony of human life.
The stop-motion animated film (*** out of four; rated R; opens Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles, expands nationwide in January) is an artsy display put on by Kaufman and fellow co-director Duke Johnson that raises the level of the genre, though it sometimes tries to enjoy its individual oddity too much chronicling one night in a bored businessman’s life.
A British author flown to various cities to motivate customer-service types, Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) visits Cincinnati and is just going through the motions — listening to the droning tourism advice of a cabbie, having a disaster of a meetup with his ex in a hotel bar, checking in with his family back in Los Angeles.
'Anomalisa' strives for 'daring' originality
Michael meets a reserved woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), in town from Akron to hear him speak, and suddenly both of their nights pick up. He’s fascinated by her voice and her personality, she can’t believe this gray-haired, middle-aged dude finds her attractive, and their conversation — and an impressively crafted, unmistakably honest intimate encounter — shakes up their individual status quos.
Kaufman and Johnson put a fuzzy ethereal sheen on the animation, giving Michael and Lisa’s story a great dreamy quality to complement the sheer emotion they get out of inanimate puppets. One quickly forgets that these humans aren’t human — it’s really a feat the way the puppets’ eyes sparkle and how they brush hair out of their face, little details that let the viewer visit their familiar yet artificial landscape.
The fledgling central relationship is a profound one because of Thewlis’ soft English lilt for Michael and the way Leigh imbues an inviting naivete to Lisa. When Michael asks Lisa for a little song, the actress breaks out a version of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun that’s both a sincere showstopper and an impassioned heartbreaker.
The other characters in the movie have the same monotone courtesy of Tom Noonan — an audible metaphor for the way Michael sees the world around him, making the charge to his system more marked when he hears someone with a different voice. Anomalisa never dives into pretension with its themes but there are darkly comic moments where it loses its way, such as when Michael goes to the heart of his hotel for a very strange meeting with the manager.
The weird stuff is one of Kaufman’s signatures, since this is the guy who co-wrote Adaptation with his fictitious twin brother and literally went digging around an actor’s brain with Being John Malkovich. What really makes Anomalisa special, though, is its embrace of the simple: the way two handmade stand-ins for humans can look at each other lying in a hotel room and capture a sense of romance and connection that would be remarkable with two real actors.