An anomaly is something that deviates from the common, and Charlie Kaufman’s ANOMALISA deliciously deviates from the common concept of animation.
ANOMALISA is Charlie Kaufman’s second feature as director, following 2008’s superb and underrated Synecdoche, New York, and seventh as a writer, with screenplays that include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
ANOMALISA is an intricate psychological tragicomedy told using stop-motion puppets, for which he’s teamed up with animator Duke Johnson. It’s a marriage made in movie heaven.
The picture opens on a plane which is carrying customer service guru, Michael, to Cincinnati where he is to give a presentation to a throng of disciples. As a co passenger drones on, Michael is contemplating catching up with a woman he deserted years ago. To many, Michael is the messiah, but he is suffering a mid-life crisis. Everyone he meets has the same voice, their faces a stitched on facade. The world seems banal, boring, mundane.
Michael manages to meet his ex, but it does not go well, and he winds up back at his hotel in the bar downing his beloved Belvedere martinis. Here he meets two women who have travelled to hear him speak and he is majorly taken by one of them, Lisa, by her voice, which is distinct and different from everyone else he encounters. Lisa is an anomaly and he affectionately calls her Anomalisa.
David Thewlis voices Michael; Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa. Tom Noonan voices all the other characters. Like a Raymond Carver short story, ANOMALISA is an exquisitely crafted and imaginatively presented story of the minutiae of the mundane made profound. Kaufman conjures a little bit of Kafka too, in a nightmare sequence triggered by Michael’s phalanx of anxieties.
Heartbreaking, compassionate, emphatically empathetic with the modern malady of alienation, ANOMALISA is a beautifully hand-crafted gem that is original in its ordinariness, an originality that elevates it to the extraordinary and deserves not only awards but box office rewards.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is stupendously superb voicing Lisa, a performance as good as her Academy Award nominated turn in The Hateful Eight. It’s a diametric opposite which illustrates the range and nuance this underrated actress possesses.
The film has been nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, but it leaves many of Best Picture nominees in the dust, and with its devil in the detail textures, blows its animated competitors out of the water.
Puppet sex, Japanese esoteric erotica, Joe Passarelli’s superb cinematography and Carter Burwell’s sublime score marks the ascension of animation from the clutches of cartoon.
Unique, unforgettable, a Masterpiece