Review: Anomalisa

Anomalisa (15)

USA 2015 90 mins  Dir: Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson  Starring (voices): David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan

A stop-motion animated puppet masturbating over internet porn? It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect from Nick Park. But Charlie Kaufman sets out to do something rather different with the medium in this over-praised, Oscar-nominated animation that features full-frontal nudity and the most alarmingly erotic puppet sex scene this side of Team America: World Police. It’s adapted by Kaufman from his 2005 stage play inspired by the Fregoli delusion (Google it) in conjunction with stop-motion animator Duke Johnson, who conjured up the puppets using 3D printer technology.

The opening cacophony of overlapping, identical voices (all Tom Noonan) plunges us into the beige world of glum, bored, middle-aged business motivation guru Michael Stone (David Thewlis), who exists in a state of perpetual low-level irritation. He’s on a flight to Cincinnati to speak at a customer service conference and it quickly becomes clear that he perceives everyone around him – even his wife and son – as speaking in the same monotonous, bland, unmodulated tone of voice. At the hotel, he calls an old flame and invites her for a drink. But she’s still wounded by the way her treated her, so their encounter ends disastrously (“We’re not going to fuck, Michael!”). Then he hears a distinctive woman’s voice cutting through the fog of identical chatter in the hotel corridor. Jolted back to life, he tracks her down to her room. She turns out to be Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – a dumpy, insecure, poorly educated woman who hasn’t had sex for eight years and is attending the conference with her much more attractive friend, Emily.

How you’ll respond to all this depends largely on your level of tolerance of the solipsism that seems to be endemic to a certain strain of indie film-making. Fortunately, Kaufman leavens this with a welcome vein of droll humour, from Michael’s irresistible chat-up lines (“Would you ladies like to get a drink at the bar? We could talk about phone system innovations.”) to his mistaking a sex shop for a toy emporium (“I’m looking for a toy for my son, Henry”). He also has much fun with the fact that the familiar tired, insincere banalities passed off as profundity in Michael’s lauded tome How May I Help You Help Them? are now fuelling his annoyance at the, ahem, customer service interface.

The antecedents in this authentic landscape of mediocrity and disappointment are pretty obvious, from Reggie Perrin to John Updike’s Rabbit, but Kaufman and Johnson do succeed in adding a creepy veneer with their genuinely unnerving puppets. This reaches its apotheosis in a fabulous dream sequence in which their removable face plates are exposed, like Westworld reminagined by, well, Charlie Kaufman.