Here's what the films of Charlie Kaufman teach us about life:
It is a conformist wasteland full of petty annoyances and soul-crushing banality.
It is an ash-gray blanket of loneliness, longing, and depression.
The best we can hope for is some sliver of transcendence, like spending a few minutes inside John Malkovich's head before getting deposited off the New Jersey Turnpike.
Love is all that matters, but it almost never lasts.
This is the philosophy of a man who might be found under his desk, curled up in a fetal ball. And it's possible that just one more person talking to him about the weather would do it. Instead, however, Kaufman remains perhaps the most brilliant comic mind in American film, with a special gift for turning existential anguish into conceptually inspired and unmistakably personal films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. His latest effort as writer and director—and his first in the seven years since Synecdoche—is the stop-motion marvel Anomalisa, a caustic and beautiful comedy that distills his point of view as well as anything he's done before. His torments are once again our pleasure.
Anomalisa was originally a play Kaufman had written in 2005, and it began its arduous journey to the screen in July 2012, when he teamed up with Community's Dan Harmon and Dimo Stamatopoulos to raise money for the project via Kickstarter. They asked for $200,000 to make a 40-minute movie. They got double that and made a 90-minute movie. This won't surprise anyone who's seen Synecdoche, New York, which is about a filmmaker who keeps adding layers upon layers to a project until it completely gets away from him. But the stop-motion process—along with Kaufman's small-scale conceit about "a man crippled by the mundanity of his life"—enforces a discipline on the film that serves it nicely. Animation is too much of a pain in the ass to accommodate one of Kaufman's typically delirious third acts.
There are many speaking parts in Anomalisa, but only three actors doing the voices. David Thewlis plays our beleaguered hero Michael, a transplanted Brit who has come to Cincinnati to give a keynote speech on customer service, but can't walk a foot in the city without somebody telling him to visit the zoo or try the chili. (A cabbie suggests he can do both in an hour.) Everyone he meets, man or woman, speaks in the same voice (Tom Noonan's), which is Kaufman's shorthand way of lumping them in a chorus of Midwestern bland. Though married with a kid—who he calls "slugger" with the rote cheeriness of a father who doesn't care anymore—Michael goes out looking for some action, and he settles on Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a wallflower who doesn't sound like anyone else. Lisa works the phones at a company that sells packaged bakery goods out of Akron—brownie balls are their latest confection—and she's really into Cyndi Lauper. Michael is enchanted.
Though Michael sets himself apart from these conformist stiffs, Kaufman doesn't let him off the hook so easily. Michael may be a big shot at the convention, with the swag to raid the mini-bar at a mid-range Cincinnati hotel, but he's really just there to offer advice about smiling on the phone and other customer service tidbits from a book called How May I Help You Help Them?. Kaufman is always hardest on surrogates like Michael or "Charlie Kaufman" (Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation or the wonderfully named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Synecdoche, New York, but their restless desire for a better and more meaningful life is equally genuine. Michael doesn't need another lumpy Midwesterner telling him to try the chili—he wants love to take him away from the people who bore him, not least of all himself.
The animation is spearheaded by co-director Duke Johnson, the man responsible for the Rankin/Bass-style Christmas episode of Community, and it has all the hand-crafted charm of stop-motion, but with more fluidity of movement. Faces are detachable and bodies interchangeable, which lends the sameness of the voices more dramatic sense than would have been possible in live-action. It's also a great conduit for jokes: Jokes about hot-running hotel showers, jokes about mechanical sex dolls from Japan, jokes about a particularly apologetic cunnilingus session. Anomalisa represents Kickstarter culture at its most exciting and adventurous; it's a cult oddity that has absolutely no place in commercial culture, but got summoned into existence anyway. And in the middle of a festival stocked with dozens of drab, banal, forgettable movies, it's that rare sliver of transcendence.