Far from wooden

Hollywood might be Tinseltown but it’s also a place where businesspeople are always trying to make the most profit with the least risk. There’s a good reason why so many movies at the multiplex are based on comic books, or are sequels to previous blockbusters, or are remakes fondly regarded works of yesteryear. Everything is stale, boring, dumb, dull, rehashed, and utterly predictable.

And that’s why I love Charlie Kaufman so much. I might not always get his movies but they sure do get into my head. They’re unpredictable. They’re interesting in some very unexpected ways. They’re far from formulaic. They’re intellectual without coming across like a heavy-handed philosophy professor. And they don’t necessarily have easy, happy endings.

Don’t believe me? Anomalisa is a good introduction to this brilliant writer and his work. Kaufman has come up with Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, other inventive movies that are unforgettable yet impossible to categorize. He imbues his characters with neuroses and realistic flaws, portraying them much as actual human beings despite the absurdity of the plot.

This movie is all of that and more: it’s all done with stop-motion animated puppets. If you’ve ever doubted the power and emotional weight that dramatic puppetry can offer then the day has come to dispel that notion. These 3-D printed dolls are human, with only modestly choppy movements and slight gaps where their body parts connect with each other. Don’t worry. Kaufman finds a way to work that organically into the story at one point too.

The story focuses on Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a customer service expert and author. Poor guy though … he’s got a big problem. Everybody else looks and sounds the same to him. He seems to be having some kind of midlife meltdown. And then he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) by a quirk of fate. She’s a fan of his but doesn’t think much of herself. He’s immediately smitten. How do two poor souls come together with their problems and desires, their confusions and hopes, in such odd circumstances?

Frankly, Kaufman isn’t going to give the audience a break on wrapping life up in a neat little story. While there are some wonderfully comic moments that add levity to this otherwise anxious snippet of a character’s life, Anomalisa mostly exists as a ponderous visual essay. It poses such questions as ‘what makes two people fall in love?’ and ‘what makes each of us unique when there are so many people on the planet?’ and ‘what will you do when you feel like you’ve become stagnant?’ No answers are given in the film because we’re meant to answer them for ourselves, I guess.

And that’s why I love Kaufman. Anomalisa is brilliant and sad, beautifully tender and excruciatingly painful at times too. If you’re not familiar with him or his writing, you might consider it to be a fair bit idiosyncratic and more than a touch self-indulgent. It’s hard to disagree with that. However, I’ve still fallen in love with his approach to storytelling, the themes he tackles, and his relatable characters and the situations that they find themselves in.

That, plus the puppetry here is amazing and the voice work is deft and genuine. It’s marvelous to see Jennifer Jason Leigh returning to prominence in this voice role and in The Hateful Eight. David Thewlis also does a fine job but I’m especially impressed by Tom Noonan who spoke every line of dialogue for all of the numerous other characters that weren’t Michael or Lisa.

Anomalisa is a real human movie, a think piece that leaves you wondering and feeling all at the same time. It’s also a masterful technical achievement. If there was cause for new Oscar categories for stop motion and voice work, this is the movie. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before.