Tom Noonan voices all but two characters in Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s debut foray into stop-motion animation. His sound echoes through the film with merciless monotony, filtering into hotel concierges, airplane pilots, old lovers, admiring fans, diffident new flings. He haunts the film’s morose protagonist, Michael Stone (David Thewlis) – a speaker, author and expert on all things customer service – with relentless cordiality. In effect, he’s a direct reflection of Michael – an audible embodiment of the man’s inner turmoil.
This is Kaufman’s second directorial endeavor, and it builds on the work of Synecdoche, New York as another explicit reconstruction of life, in all its absurdities and mundanities. Synecdoche centered on Caden Cotard, an unhappy middle-aged man who was consumed by his fears of mortality and his dreams of honest recognition. He tackled his neuroses by (literally) using the world as his stage, with drama acting as the therapeutic vessel. He populated his ever-expanding production with scenarios taken from his daily life, and characters based on those in his circles – starting with himself. Little tidbit: the man cast in that principal role (as in, the actor playing Caden playing Caden) was Tom Noonan.
Where Synecdoche confronts the human condition with convoluted physical demonstration, Anomalisa relies on verbal expression – and Noonan’s roles in the two films act as a rather poetic throughline. In the former, he’s ubiquitous in his physicality, but spare in his speech; in the latter, his words command as his characters’ faces indistinctly blend. But he’s the representational core in both cases – a ghostlike presence that manifests in tandem with Kaufman’s obscure vision.
This is the magic of Charlie Kaufman, a once-lauded screenwriter who has since burst into directing with a pair of audacious features. Each successive movie enriches his filmography in more ways than one – the trippy love story of Anomalisa both informs and draws from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; the formal ambitions evident in Synecdoche manage to contrast and compliment its follow-up – even as his work has turned more suggestive and melancholy through the years. Just in looking at how a character actor like Tom Noonan collectively fits into Synecdoche and Anomalisa, the whole of Kaufman’s career starts to seem even more impressive than the sum of its parts.
Anomalisa is a Charlie Kaufman movie, through and through: personal, wise, perplexing, cutting and endlessly surprising. It possesses the romantic soul of Eternal Sunshine, the unpredictability of Adaptation and the encompassing misery of Synecdoche. Adapted from Kaufman’s stage-play, the film is condensed in a way that American movies tend not to be; it flows as a collection of extended scenes stitched together with rich emotional cohesion. The first act is its most understated, tracking Michael from mid-air to hotel room: he’s flying out from Los Angeles to give a speech in Cincinnati, the home of an old flame and of painfully friendly passers-by. We spend a good chunk of time in his cab ride from the airport, where the driver encourages Michael to spend his time at the zoo or scarfing down chili. Upon arrival at the hotel, Michael is stuck listening to an eager-to-please concierge, from lobby exit to elevator ride to room entrance. (Kaufman doesn’t let a millisecond slip in-between.) And finally, after all that talking, Michael is left alone. He goes to the bathroom, makes the obligatory call to his wife and son, and orders room service.
It’s a plain, elongated opening, streaked with Kaufman’s peculiar humor and touches of animated allure. But the theatrical beats suit Anomalisa immediately – its verbose language and languid pacing establish an atmosphere that submerges us into Michael’s longing state-of-mind. He begs his lost love, Belle, to meet him for drinks before flubbing their awkward reunion; he steps out to grab some ice after half-heartedly practicing his speech, strolling by a couple as they (again, indistinctly) hurl f-bombs at each other. Michael is a reserved man, but between the loneliness projected by his damp eyes and the surrounding cacophony of Midwestern manners, we can always hear him loud and clear.
The beginning holds a mesmerizing solemnity, but from there Anomalisa explodes with a series of bold emotional sequences. Michael meets the timid Lisa (the wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh), a worshipping fan of his books, in the hotel. She’s in possession of a voice like no other (as in, not Tom Noonan’s), and he’s instantly drawn to her bashful reluctance and barely-containable exuberance. He takes her and a friend out for a drink, promptly falls for her and, after inelegantly bidding adieu to the third wheel, invites her to his hotel room to spend the night.
As Michael and Lisa connect, the aural experience of Anomalisa turns transfixing – with Noonan’s sound finally receded, Lisa speaks in bursts of harmony. Her pupils twinkle, too, even as she covers up the scar by her right eye with her bangs. It’s all beautifully reflective of Kaufman and co-director Duke Johnson’s steadfast visual focus. The puppeteering here is minimalist, without many flourishes – the camera tells the story, zooming in on the lips and the eyes with cinematic depth, capturing sunlight as it darts through nearby windows – and this renders Anomalisa dreamily lifelike. When Lisa meets Michael, their romance radiates, and it’s both because of the intimate relatability of their initial encounter and the sense of wonder projected by Kaufman’s aesthetic choices.
These effects are compounded by Kaufman’s dramatic structure. The remarkable sex scene in Anomalisa functions as the climax to Lisa and Michael’s getting-to-know-you session – one that, without a second lost, goes from hotel room to hotel bar to hotel room, and is broken into two by a hypnotic musical interlude. (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” has never sounded better.) As an overnight story, Anomalisa embraces its time restrictions to both tonal and thematic ends. The degree of passion and care – and, most unexpectedly, authenticity – injected into the moment wherein Lisa and Michael finally have intercourse is astonishing. It’s genuinely hard to believe.
That viewing experience permeates the film at its deepest level. This is, after all, a movie about the moments that shake us – it ruminates on their significance, on how they manage to pull us into realms that lean towards fantasy. As it builds, and as Kaufman slowly parcels out his little reveals, Anomalisa unveils itself as a work about depression, less in the clinical sense than in the universal one. The film soberly depicts one man’s indistinguishable day-to-day before swiftly elevating him, presenting an anomaly in Lisa – until, again, he is brought back down to reality.
Yet Anomalisa is not so pessimistic; it doesn’t wallow in the idea that moments are just that, or that happiness is restricted to isolated episodes. Eternal Sunshine ended with the acknowledgment that no matter how futile the destiny of new love, its journey can never be replicated or avoided – Kaufman found the beauty in our perpetual quest for the soulmate. Anomalisa is similarly despairing, right to its final, bleak narrative turn. But through its naked emotional honesty, the film reaches something profound and hopeful. For Michael, for Lisa and for us, Anomalisa creates a memory of the kind that we hold tight – that we might lose nights over or helplessly wish a return to, but that also serves as an enduring reminder of joy and love, lived and treasured.
Kaufman isn’t cynical enough to reject the mighty force of romantic connection; he isn’t sour enough to deny his subjects the pleasures of a first kiss or a tender serenade. He’s merely a surreal realist – an artist speaking his truth without a set of guidelines. Anomalisa is doused in sadness and ambiguity, marked by the emotional peaks and valleys that take shape beyond human nature’s control. It’s steeped in life. And sometimes, it takes a creator like Kaufman – one embracing of the banal, the dispiriting, the inevitable and the confounding – to affirm what makes it worth living.
Grade: A