Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson (2015)
The on-screen (15) certificate for Anomalisa – with its warning of strong language, sex references and strong sex – is an unusual introduction to an animated film. The theme of existential crisis isn’t so unusual nowadays in this genre (you could say it’s a main element of Up and Inside Out, for example) but Anomalisa may be unprecedented as a thoroughly depressive animated feature. This isn’t a surprise, though: the film is written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. (The design of the puppets and the stop-motion animation are the work of co-director Duke Johnson.)
Michael Stone, who looks fiftyish, arrives from Los Angeles for an overnight stay in Cincinnati, where he’ll give a speech at a conference on customer service the following day. By the time we’ve seen the nervous flyer beside him on the plane, the taxi driver who takes him to his hotel, and the staff in reception there, it’s evident that Michael has a problem: each person with whom he’s had contact has the same face and the same voice. Although we’re not yet sure if this is an objective fact of his life or a figment of Michael’s jaded view, we can guess. As in Kaufman’s previous film, Synecdoche, New York, a key presence in the story is named for the complaint which may be afflicting the main character. In Synecdoche, the protagonist was Caden Cotard; ‘Cotard’s syndrome’ causes delusional belief in a person that he or she is dead. In Anomalisa, Michael stays at the Hotel Fregoli: ‘Fregoli delusion’, according to Wikipedia, ‘is a rare disorder in which a person [believes] …that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise’.
Michael laments that ‘everything’s boring’ and his unvarying perception of the world extends well beyond transient contacts. When he phones home, his wife and son sound the same as the people in Cincinnati. He looks up Bella, a Cincinnati woman with whom he had a relationship some years ago, before he left her. She agrees to come to the hotel and they meet in the bar but Bella, who is also like everyone else that Michael experiences, walks out even before she’s finished her drink. You can’t blame her: Michael deserted her without warning in the mid-1990s (it’s 2005 now) yet she’s expected to listen to how unhappy his existence has become in the interim. Everything changes for Michael later that evening when, in his room, he hears from the corridor a voice that doesn’t sound like other voices: ‘There’s someone else there!’ he excitedly exclaims. He scrambles into his clothes and goes from door to hotel room door to track down the voice’s owner. She is Lisa Hesselman – as well as sounding different, she looks it. Lisa has travelled from Akron, Ohio with her more assured (and supposedly prettier) friend and colleague Emily, to attend the following day’s conference. The three have drinks together in the bar before Michael invites Lisa back to his room. When he tells her, ‘I think you’re extraordinary’, she can’t realise that, in Michael’s case, this is much more than a romantic cliché. She’s attracted to him, though; they make love and spend the night together. While they’re having breakfast next morning, Michael starts seeing flaws in Lisa; as they multiply, they qualify her uniqueness. He delivers his conference speech, although it doesn’t go as he intended. He flies home to Los Angeles, as planned.
The cast numbers just three: David Thewlis voices Michael, Jennifer Jason Leigh Lisa, and Tom Noonan everyone else – male or female, adult or child. (Noonan played Caden Cotard’s alter ego in Synecdoche, New York.) The widespread praise for Anomalisa isn’t undeserved – the film is formally and visually original, and frequently witty – but, seven years after Synecdoche, it’s more of the same Charlie Kaufman pessimism. His gloom is so essential and comprehensive that any switch to a more hopeful mood seems phony – except when Kaufman finds a means of giving the audience a powerful emotional lift. That happens just once in Anomalisa, when Lisa, shortly after they’ve gone back to Michael’s room and at his insistence, sings Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s two minutes of singing were one of the best bits of The Hateful Eight too.) Otherwise, the awkwardly tender night of love is awkward in the wrong way and sentimental rather than tender. Michael is miserably disconnected; Lisa isn’t conventionally attractive, is self-conscious about a facial disfigurement, and hasn’t slept with anyone for eight years. It’s therefore meant to be deeply affecting, from both their points of views, that he experiences feelings for her and that they have sex. By this stage in the story, however, Michael’s weary self-pity has already become tiresome. Rather than feeling his pain, we may feel that he’s a pain. As a result, the coupling is remarkable chiefly as a technical achievement – intercourse between stop-motion animated figures.
The appearance of the clones in Anomalisa is, of course, unappealing – they’re what the jaundiced eyes of Michael see. They have another design feature, which also affects Michael. The figures, seen as whole bodies, tend to squatness and seem foreshortened, even though they’re not disproportionately small within their surroundings. In Michael’s case particularly, the contrast between his low-slung body and his long, expressive face is disquieting. (There were moments, as he moved round the hotel corridors, when I was reminded of the architect’s nightmare in Dead of Night, as the legs of the ventriloquist’s dummy start working independently.) Charlie Kaufman originally wrote the story as a ‘sound play’ and expressed reservations about turning it into an animated film but there’s no doubt that Duke Johnson’s puppets express Michael Stone’s state of mind in more ways than one. Not only is everyone in his world, except for Lisa, indistinguishable from the next man or woman. Michael’s view of himself includes both a sense of being trapped in his particular identity – manifested in the limited flexibility of his puppet incarnation – and a fear of disintegration. While Michael is shaving, he’s momentarily alarmed that his head seems to be coming apart; in a later sequence, eventually revealed to be a nightmare, the lower part of his face falls clean off (revealing a metal, Ex Machina-like substructure).
Although it makes logical sense for all except Michael and Lisa to be voiced by the same actor, the effect of Tom Noonan’s voice doesn’t put us in Michael’s head. The rhythms give it a slightly android quality but the voice is pleasantly modulated and lulling rather than oppressive (and Noonan naturally provides some variation to reflect people’s differing moods). David Thewlis’s voicing of Michael is a very different matter: the prevailing tetchy, exasperated tone and the flat Lancastrian twang clearly express Michael’s inner feelings. Thewlis’s characterisation doesn’t, though, suggest much difference between Michael’s private self and public face – there’s not a trace of a smooth PR operator here. In the film as a whole, the importance (or otherwise) of the theme of façade is a bit elusive.
Reviews of Anomalisa have described Michael as a ‘customer services guru’ and ‘motivational speaker’. When he first meets Lisa, she’s clutching a copy of Michael’s book, ‘How May I Help You Help Them?’ and can scarcely believe she’s talking with such a big name in the field. When Michael is practising his speech, however, it’s written in longhand and its opening consists of extremely basic advice: it doesn’t sound motivational and you wonder how he managed to write a whole book on the subject. I didn’t understand this contradiction. Is the idea that it’s hard to be inspiring – even to say much – about customer service? That’s evidently not true in terms of Michael’s public image or quantity of output.
At breakfast in his room the morning after their night together, Michael says he’ll leave his wife and child and asks Lisa to live with him. The moment she agrees, Michael starts noticing things about her that irritate him – the noise she makes with her fork, eating with her mouth full, being ‘controlling’. Her voice develops a shadow voice – the one that Michael hears issuing from everyone else. It’s the beginning of the end. During his conference speech, Michael departs from his prepared script; and Charlie Kaufman virtually departs from the character of Michael when he starts inveighing against the Bush administration. Of course there’s no reason why an expatriate Englishman shouldn’t be disgusted that ‘the president is a war criminal’ and that ‘they’ve destroyed the public education system’ but you feel at this point that you’re hearing the voice of Michael’s creator rather than his own.
That may well be true also of the existential part of Michael’s digression on the conference platform, and of what follows. It’s more interesting, though – not least because it’s puzzling too. Michael, after the experience of Lisa, exhorts the conference delegates to see what’s unique in each individual; yet when the camera cuts to the audience, the Lisa sitting there has acquired the face of everyone else. When he gets back to Los Angeles, his wife Donna presents Michael with a roomful of surprise-party guests: they all look the same (as does Donna); he says he doesn’t know any of them. So Michael’s passionate advice to the conference turns out to be a case of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do. He also feels a claustrophobic pressure from the threat of being loved. In his nightmare, first the male hotel manager then the massed ranks of female secretaries at desks in a big open-plan office, want Michael to have sex with them. In real life, when he gets back to LA, he feels smothered by the presumably platonic warm feelings of his unwanted house guests. This aspect of Michael partly chimes with his sense of possessing a reverse Midas touch – anything or anyone who gets near him turns to stone (Stone) – but that isn’t really explored.
Michael is sympathetic only for as long as he’s on the receiving end of overly ingratiating hotel staff (as you’d expect, the rituals and absurdities of a place like the Fregoli are acutely observed by Kaufman). Michael’s capacity for self-criticism hardly makes him any less self-centred; he’s a moaner too. I think the main problem I had with Michael’s treatment of Lisa, however, was in feeling that it was Charlie Kaufman who was using Lisa – as a way of making his leading man more fascinating. The film has another good Kaufman title. It would be an even better one if he’d foregone explanation of it in a forced exchange between Michael and Lisa. On the other hand … in the final scene, as she writes a letter to Michael, Lisa tells him that ‘anomalisa’, according to her dictionary, means ‘goddess of heaven’ in Japanese. I don’t know if this is true, or whether the Japanese animatronic woman – which Michael buys from a sex toys emporium near the Hotel Fregoli and takes home as a present for his young son – is an image of the deity.
14 March 2016