*****
THE last film from writer-director Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York (2008), was about a megalomaniacal theatre director intent on putting his whole life on stage, even if that meant building a stage the size of a city and dying in it. Conceived as a horror movie, it underwent a dramatic change of course when Kaufman realised that the most horrifying thing he could think of wasn’t a masked man with a kitchen knife or an army of flesh-eating zombies – it was just being alive. Getting older, losing friends, falling out of love, loneliness. If that’s what it’s like when you’re awake, who needs nightmares? Eight years later, Kaufman’s new film, Anomalisa, continues to explore this insight, but on a smaller scale and with puppets.
Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a self-help author with a best-selling book on customer service. He tells his readers to ‘look for what is special about each individual’; unfortunately, he has a hard time following his own advice. Arriving in Cincinnati for a business conference, he can scarcely conceal the irritation he feels at the slightest human interaction, from making small talk with a taxi driver to checking in at his hotel. This isn’t just the ordinary tetchiness of the business traveller, either. Michael is sick of other people because to him they are all the same – every person he encounters has the same face and the same voice (Tom Noonan). Alienated from the rest of humanity by this bizarre psychological defect, he seems condemned to a life of misery. And then he meets Lisa.
An unremarkable young woman from the fifth largest city in Ohio, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works in customer-service for a company that distributes baked goods. She has a scar by her right eye and her favourite musician is Cyndi Lauper. Most people wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a crowd, but Michael is instantly infatuated, for the simple reason that she doesn’t look or sound like everybody else. He takes her back to his room and attempts to seduce her, and though she is initially perplexed by his attentions, with a little encouragement she finally abandons her inhibitions. ‘I think you’re extraordinary,’ he tells her. ‘I don’t know why – it’s just obvious to me.’ This is the stuff that movie trailers are made of.
Movie trailers, but not Charlie Kaufman films. According to cinematic convention, there are two ways a story can go from this point. Either the characters join forces and ride off into the sunset, or they experience their moment of grace and return to their previous lives, changed in ways they will never fully comprehend. Suffice it to say, what happens in Anomalisa is neither. Kaufman’s view of human relationships is too pessimistic to allow such easy consolations, and we are left in no doubt that Michael’s attachment to Lisa is entirely self-interested, even if Michael himself is not aware of it. The closest thing the film has to a moment of grace is a whispered rendition of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, and while this is genuinely touching, there’s no escaping the fact that it is also a punchline. Even the conceit of using stop-motion puppets instead of actors has a deflating effect, inasmuch as it suggests the possibility of a heightened or expanded reality that never materialises.
None of this is to say that Anomalisa is a bad film. It is, in its deliberately small way, almost beautiful, and it contains numerous moments of awkward, well-observed humour. But whereas in Synecdoche, New York Kaufman was able to capitalise on the tension between his gloomy world view and the Joycean tumult of his cinematic ambitions – a tension cleverly/maddeningly written into the plot – the consolations he offers here are more modest in scale. In the end, there is little to say about Anomalisa but this: that it is a small, sometimes funny film about depression. With puppets.
Anomalisa is showing at HOME and Cineworld Didsbury.
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