Review | Film review: Anomalisa – Charlie Kaufman’s eccentric, visionary masterpiece
It’s a return to form for the idiosyncratic writer and director – a film that therapists could spend years analysing, imbued with enough of his familiar melancholic humour to soothe away the blues
5/5 stars
Eight years since Synecdoche, New York, his first movie as director following a hugely admired screenwriting career, Charlie Kaufman finally returns with Anomalisa. It’s a beguiling, beautiful stop-motion animation about that most fundamental of subjects – what it means to be human. Kaufman’s protracted absence from our screens evidently hasn’t hampered any of his invention or eccentricity.
Set over a weekend, the story centres on Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a motivational speaker who arrives at a Cincinnati hotel to deliver a keynote speech. A married man, the depressed Stone is weighed down by a midlife crisis until he encounters Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a telesales girl in town to hear him speak. They fall under each other’s spell; and Michael dreams of another life with this shy, reserved singleton.
This barest of outlines doesn’t begin to capture the film’s strangeness, nor its sweetness. Co-directed by animator Duke Johnson, the puppets have a softness to them, making scenes like Michael and Lisa’s lovemaking tender, not tacky. The film is full of Kaufman’s trademark surreal touches, notably in the way every face that Michael sees, bar Lisa’s, has a uniform quality to it (disconcertingly, everyone else is voiced by Tom Noonan).
