Anomalisa

Anomalisa

In American cinema there is a whole lot going on, and then there’s just how much Charlie Kaufman is doing. Since 1999’s “Being John Malkovich,” he has belonged to a select group of U.S. screenplay writers whose imagination is so strong that they have to be considered an auteur in their own right even though film is supposedly a director’s medium. His texts have been brought by formidable directors like Spike Jonze (“Malkovich” and “Adaptation”) and Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Human Nature”), but those were unmistakably Charlie Kaufman movies nonetheless, speaking their own language down to earth at one moment, elevated the next.

“Synecdoche, New York,” which added mordant humor to slapstick, self-reflexive storytelling and imagery drawn from psychoanalysis as well as poetry and dreams, marked the pinnacle so far of this tendency in films written by Kaufman who also directs them. In it a playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman) spends years (or his life?) rehearsing and rewriting an ever-growing production about his own existence that eventually becomes indistinguishable from it. Never before had wonderment been mixed with dread into any story by Kaufman with such intensity; not even “Eternal Sunshine.”

These currents flow through “Anomalisa” too. You might call it a puppet-based drama of midlife crisis except if you did, I’m not sure people would take you seriously; but then again, why start now? And anyway: Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), depressed corporate efficiency expert, perceives every voice male or female as the same voice (Tom Noonan’s); he falls for Lisa Hesselman (Jennifer Jason Leigh), shy young woman attending his Cincinnati seminar on customer service; this much we know or do we?

The picture is based on an “audio play” by Kaufman, which was first presented as one of several such plays in collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen and composer Carter Burwell, who has scored films by both brothers including this one. For the movie version, actors read their lines while Burwell conducted a live score and foley artists provided background noise; Kaufman co-directed with Duke Johnson, stop-motion animator whose credits include “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” episode of “Community.”

It puts a visual track to Kaufman’s audio play. The puppets are designed to look like puppets, even down to the segmented lines of their face plates. But they move so fluidly and talk so naturally (even when they’re skipping across the tops of desks, as seen in our illustration) that it’s easy to forget you’re not watching people.

Puppet characters in most other films are sprightly little creatures who exist mainly to amuse us: They make jokes; they do tricks. The characters in “Anomalisa” unsettle us. Their situation makes us contemplate 21st-century loneliness, despair and alienation subjects that would be hard to take if Kaufman didn’t write his characters with such tenderness, or let them talk so dryly.

His strategy here with co-director Johnson is to shoot these characters not cutting much but just kind of letting them sit there, and be. There are a few sneaky long takes in this movie that would get raves if they appeared in any live-action feature moments where the filmmakers simply follow the characters as they walk across different levels of the hotel or have sex on a slab-like bed somewhere else inside it.

It may sound odd, but this puppet movie actually does a better job at conveying what it is like spending a few days in a nice hotel in a city full of bad memories than most live-action films ever do. Not that that’s the sort of description that will necessarily make people rush out to see “Anomalisa.” As with so many Kaufman characters, those in this film are trying to find their way towards happiness (or what might be happiness) through clouds of social conditioning and pathologies, and against the bland indifference of a world whose billions of inhabitants all believe themselves to be the stars of their own life-movies, and often seem deeply frustrated by the fact that they haven’t had one of those movie moments where you can say “Everything’s going to be fine for this character now don’t worry about it.”

Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is unhappy with his work, his marriage (to Jennifer Jason Leigh), even his child. He seems disconnected from himself and from the world. There is not much plot in terms of things happening to him. His plane touches down in Cincinnati.

He checks into the hotel and orders room service; then he paces around smoking a cigarette while waiting for it to arrive. He impulsively invites an old flame out for a drink, hoping he’ll get lucky and being oblivious to how badly he hurt her years earlier but she shows up anyway because she doesn’t know what to expect or how else to respond when someone from her past gets back in touch like this.

Then another guest at the conference catches his eye: a young woman who wears her hair on one side so as to hide a scar on her face (her name is Lisa). She’s voiced by Tom Noonan like everyone else except Michael and Michael’s ex-girlfriend. It’s love at first sight or rather Michael thinks it is and takes it as such; if nothing else, he sees her as a figure of redemption who can lift him out of this existential funk.

But by now we have spent enough time with Michael to know that he’s not the best judge of what he needs. In fact his judgment is consistently terrible, so that at some point in the proceedings you stop feeling for him and start wondering whether he might be suffering from some kind of emotional or mental disability (beyond the one suggested by the title). Then you begin thinking about yourself as much as him, considering your own fears and weaknesses and blind spots and recurring patterns against a world that barely seems to acknowledge your presence.

For all its visual audacity and emotional honesty and despite being fundamentally unimaginable as anything other than a puppet film “Anomalisa” is in many respects a small work. It feels somewhat sealed off from reality even while engaging with it; it ends rather abruptly just when it appeared to be gathering steam toward some larger statement or more definite resolution; and the general outlines of Michael’s story are far from new (Middle-Aged Upper-Middle Class Male Grappling With Despair has become something of a genre unto itself by now).

But there is such beauty and sadness in it, and so many exquisitely realized scenes (including an impromptu musical number that ranks among Kaufman’s finest moments), that one would have to be mean-spirited indeed to dismiss it. Whether you leave ecstatically impressed, bored or let down by “Anomalisa,” you will know you have seen something different. Too many movies speak in a boringly familiar storytelling voice.

This creature communicates using verbalization as unique as Lisa’s.

Watch Anomalisa For Free On Gomovies.