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| Directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman Written by Charlie Kaufman |
SPOILER WARNING
Alo Party Peoples.
Animation is film making unrestrained by reality. It is the magic of moving pictures in its purest possible form. It is every outlandish or offbeat idea that you can imagine perfectly realized onscreen, offering the artist complete creative control. Which is why it's so popular with the art house set, the best way to make an indie brat even more pretentious is to remove the need to interact with other humans, and the complete creative control animations offers means that to a certain stripe of critic - say, the kind that attend the film festivals where Anomalisa has been building up hype and acclaim for months - the medium automatically makes what's being depicted seem more meaningful regardless of whether it actually is. Fortunately, Charlie Kaufman is no mere indie brat, and Anomalisa is the real deal.
It's 2005, and David Thewlis is the voice of Michael Stone, author of "How May I Help You Help Them?", a very successful self-help guide for sales representatives, and working in that field for years has made him emotionally distant from everyone around him, to the point that literally everyone else looks and sounds like Tom Noonan. He's speaking about his book at a convention at a hotel in Cincinnati, where he runs into his old flame at the bar, and promptly kills any chance of hooking back up. As he storms off back to his suite, he hears something amazing, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, an insecure young woman and the only person in the world that looks different to Michael. She's an anomaly in his life, hence the title, and thus he must use his one night in Cincinnati to court her.
Anomalisa is a film about detachment, and every detail of the production is built around that theme; the painstakingly detailed environments are realistically drab and banal, the characters constantly teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, it sets itself in a Middle American city that has virtually no identity as far as cinema is concerned, the "camera" takes long, slow tracking shots through the hotel's washed out red and beige interiors, it's all meant to get us into the same melancholic meandering mindset as Michael. For a while you wonder why this story is being told in animation to begin with, that it would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper to shoot real actors in a real hotel, but eventually you forget that, and Anomalisa reveals itself to be such an intimate, low-key thing, that shooting it with real actors with recognizable faces would take away from its universality.
Alo Party Peoples.
Animation is film making unrestrained by reality. It is the magic of moving pictures in its purest possible form. It is every outlandish or offbeat idea that you can imagine perfectly realized onscreen, offering the artist complete creative control. Which is why it's so popular with the art house set, the best way to make an indie brat even more pretentious is to remove the need to interact with other humans, and the complete creative control animations offers means that to a certain stripe of critic - say, the kind that attend the film festivals where Anomalisa has been building up hype and acclaim for months - the medium automatically makes what's being depicted seem more meaningful regardless of whether it actually is. Fortunately, Charlie Kaufman is no mere indie brat, and Anomalisa is the real deal.
It's 2005, and David Thewlis is the voice of Michael Stone, author of "How May I Help You Help Them?", a very successful self-help guide for sales representatives, and working in that field for years has made him emotionally distant from everyone around him, to the point that literally everyone else looks and sounds like Tom Noonan. He's speaking about his book at a convention at a hotel in Cincinnati, where he runs into his old flame at the bar, and promptly kills any chance of hooking back up. As he storms off back to his suite, he hears something amazing, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, an insecure young woman and the only person in the world that looks different to Michael. She's an anomaly in his life, hence the title, and thus he must use his one night in Cincinnati to court her.
Anomalisa is a film about detachment, and every detail of the production is built around that theme; the painstakingly detailed environments are realistically drab and banal, the characters constantly teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, it sets itself in a Middle American city that has virtually no identity as far as cinema is concerned, the "camera" takes long, slow tracking shots through the hotel's washed out red and beige interiors, it's all meant to get us into the same melancholic meandering mindset as Michael. For a while you wonder why this story is being told in animation to begin with, that it would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper to shoot real actors in a real hotel, but eventually you forget that, and Anomalisa reveals itself to be such an intimate, low-key thing, that shooting it with real actors with recognizable faces would take away from its universality.
But the cast they do have is terrific, David Thewlis infuses Michael with real vulnerability and inner life as someone that's bored with the banality of their existence but can't quite conceive of anything else, Tom Noonan as nearly everyone is believably average, and if the Academy took voice acting seriously as a discipline I garuntee you Jennifer Jason Leigh would be nominated for her performance here over The Hateful Eight. At first Lisa and her relationship with Michael look like the most insufferable version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl imaginable, to the point that she is literally the only person in the world that registers as different to him. But then, as their night together wears on, Michael starts to get a little more demanding. Telling Lisa to keep talking because he can't be without the sound of her voice, getting her to give him her life story, eventually convincing her to have sex with him, exploiting her own vulnerabilities to his advantage.
This is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, this is a somber deconstruction of one. Not one that's angry about it that violently tears it apart, but one that simply lets the trope play out as it understands it in such a way that it tells the audience "Look at this. Isn't it pathetic?" The morning after Michael and Lisa have their affair, when they're eating breakfast a few hours before Michael has to give his speech, they're discussing maybe running off with each other, but just as Michael is getting Lisa onboard, tinges of Tom Noonan's voice infringe on Lisa's, soon they sound one and the same. Michael has tired of the fantasy, and he's so horrified by this that when he finally goes onstage, he has a mental breakdown and totally bombs it.
Anomalisa is very avant garde, incredibly strange, and not for the faint of heart, but if you consider yourself a lover of animation, or even just a lover of film, you owe yourself a viewing. This is a masterpiece, and that is not a term I use lightly.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 5/5
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