Unless your name is Polyanna, I think you’d agree that it’s often hard to stand out in a crowd. And if you’re sad and lonely, it can truly be a miracle when you find that special someone who completes you. The new movie, Anomalisa, expresses these emotions in a way that’s exciting and original, yet ultimately obvious and heavy-handed. The direction you lean after seeing it may depend on how much you relate to the main character and the situation.
It may also depend on how open-minded you are toward the medium writer-director Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) uses to tell his story. Anomalisa is an animated film. However, the characters resemble the puppets from Team America: World Police. Since there are puppeteers in the credits, I assume at least some part of the production process involved a physical component.
Regardless of how it was accomplished, the effect is powerful. David Thewlis voices Michael Stone, a popular and successful writer who travels to Cincinnati for a speaking engagement. His face, and everyone else’s, is divided by faint lines that define sections which at times seem to move independently. It’s like everyone is a robot and these are the pieces creating their human facades. I’m certain that was Kaufman’s point.
Stone is an expert on customer service, yet struggles to make a real connection with anyone. In fact, until he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), everyone else looks basically the same and has the same voice. This isn’t a surprise or twist that I just revealed; in the credits, the only other actor listed is Tom Noonan, who voices “Everyone else.” When Stone overhears Lisa’s unique voice, he races from hotel room to hotel room to find her.
Lisa not only sounds unique, but looks unique, as well. Her face is scarred and she attempts to cover it with her hair. However, everything about her is beautiful to Stone because she’s different. The tragedy of Anomalisa is that while forcing a relationship with her, Stone may realize that he doesn’t really want different. The next morning in his hotel room, he scolds her for clinking her fork against her teeth and talking with her mouth full of food.
This is the part of the movie that resonated with me. You either have to be careful what you wish for or you are never really sure about what you want (it changes). It comes late in the movie and I don’t think it’s what was intended for me to take from it. However, it was the surprising part of Anomalisa for me. I didn’t see it coming like I did everything else. As I said earlier, that could be because of the way I relate to the various situations.
That’s the wonderful power of movies: you use your own experiences to relate to them and take something different from them than anyone else. That any movie can generate a variety of reactions means it’s doing a good job. Anomalisa does a good job; you will have a definite reaction to some aspect of it. We can’t really blame it if it’s not the reaction we expect or hope to have. Just because I didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped does not mean that you won’t or that you shouldn’t see it.
