Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion puppet movie Anomalisa (which he co-directed with Duke Johnson) is a satire of the human condition with the unsettling quality of a lucid dream. It is a masterpiece that inhabits its own spectrum of strangeness. Choosing to be amused or scared by it is the same as choosing between the blue pill and the red pill in the Matrix.
David Thewlis voices Michael, a depressed motivational speaker who has checked into a bland hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio, to give a speech to his fans. The hotel is called Fregoli’s, named after the Fregoli delusion, a condition in which sufferers believe that everyone they see is the same person in some sort of disguise.
Michael broods guiltily over an ex-girlfriend in the city whose heart he broke many years before, but makes an emotional and sexual connection with a besotted admirer staying at the same hotel, there to hear him speak. She could be an anomaly in his world of dullness and alienation (“Everything’s boring,” he mutters) and her name is Lisa, hence the film’s title.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is Lisa’s voice. But everyone else’s is that of Tom Noonan – Noonan’s sonorous male voice pours out of everyone’s mouth, including that of his wife.
Is Michael having a breakdown? Away from home, in the lab-like conditions of an identikit hotel, he embarks on a long spasm of panic; he sees everyone surrounding him to be eerily the same, with the same humanoid-puppety faces. Like a creepy community in an Ira Levin thriller, all the people around Michael seem – to him – to have the same uncanny, unknowable agenda: a secret that he’s not in on.
As for Michael himself, desire – grimly, naggingly unappeasable desire – remains at the core of his consciousness: desire for something new, something else, something that will bring him happiness at last. He journeys onward, in his cramped and miserable way, believing that the terrain will change, and the sky will change, and the answer to life’s riddle or equation will be extruded from the dull matter of existence.
But it never is. Differentness morphs diabolically into the same thing, over and over. And yet for all this, Anomalisa is a very funny, fascinating, even weirdly sensual film. It explores the interesting but little-discussed fascination of the faceless corporate hotel – how its anonymity is liberating and exciting.
Michael and Lisa have one of the most stunningly real sex scenes I have ever seen on film; the fact that they are puppets makes them more uninhibited participants than flesh-and-blood actors could have been.
There is a tinge of greatness about Anomalisa, and about Charlie Kaufman himself.
