Anomalisa (2015): Human, all too human
I read some time ago that the merit of Charlie Kaufmann's jewel (screenwriter and co-director with Duke Johnson) was to have the formal and reflective integrity of presenting a human story, all too human, through stop motion animation. There is something as ominous as it is charming in those sad figures of scarcely stylized volumes and android-looking faces (we will come back to this later). Anomalisa is an animated film, not only "for adults", but saturated with all the exasperating load that comes with the recognition that one ages too quickly. The story of Michael Stone is the story of the section of humanity which, as the years go by, learn that reasons are exhausted in a hurry. All and each one.
The film brilliantly offers a sensual correspondence between the management of technical resources and their narrative and internal consistency. Its use of an inquisitive camera, is endowed with a sensitivity for the precise details that materially sustain the cataclysm that is collapsing its main character. Extreme close ups that inform us of the movement of their hands, the disturbed looks, the textures of the skin, the nervous touch of a martini glass. The DoP (Joe Passarelli) does not treat as a mere fancy subject the extreme relevance of this microcosm of anguish and absurdity. It is perceived as there is an intentionality that usually starts from open shots until arriving, gradually, to the temple of our protagonist, Michael. From the lobby of the hotel, to the uncomfortable reception of the speaker, from the interior of the bar to the table that he shares with his guests, from the entirety of his room to the ecstatic look on Lisa's eyes as she feels herself as an object of desire. The camera is not limited to a role of mere recording instrument, but accompanies and complements the layout of the script. It legitimizes and justifies it.
David Thewlis in Anomalisa (2015), a co-production of Paramount Animation, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries. Photography courtesy of Paramount Pictures, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries.
The other technical detail that deserves to be highlighted is the use of this specific technique of animation, which is, by antonomasia, segmented, victim of vivisection. Already in the very design of the morphological features of the characters, as in the technique itself, the artificial and robotic nature of a world that overwhelms for its disenchantment is enhanced. Standing applause. Period.
Anomalisa is the sublime narration of the anomalies that illuminate, for a while, the nonsense of this gloomy hotel room in which we sit and watch life evaporates. The abject anomaly of finding pleasure outside of all those things we had thought would make us happy. To find love outside the family which, voluntarily, we decided to form. To learn that the meaning often transcends what we do with good intentions, even when this has been incarnated in other human beings, that is, the proper calibration and determination of the risks that arise by depositing all hope in the progeny. The greatest dismay does not come from that epiphany that has seemed to materialize in Lisa, who appears by chance in the life of Michael, and inoculates in his mind the heterodox seed that perceives the colorful beauty of sounds. Because the voices that, suddenly, have stopped differentiating from each other —even those that are more familiar to us and which, although we don't want to recognize it, are more endearing— are little more than noise that distracts the thoughts on his desperate search for answers. The excited voice of a son is diluted by the scandal of a crowd that consumes itself savagely. Is Kauffman's provocation understood? We are before a rigorous examination of the human projects in which are usually deposited, by social convention or supposed free will, the ulterior meaning of life itself. This can be anything but a little thing.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Thewlis in Anomalisa (2015), a co-production of Paramount Animation, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries. Photography courtesy of Paramount Pictures, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries.
The film, likewise, is a bet on the I (das Ich), somewhat the robust idealist subjectivism proposed by Fichte. That world of hotels and conferences, large departments of customer service and erotic adventures, is staged thanks to the I-creator of which Michael Stone becomes a receptacle. Lisa herself, the anomaly that decanted the hero's descent into the most abstruse inferno of his own mind, has been invested with an aura that, after a first magical night in which Michael thought he had, once again, found a real connection that would anchor him to the world that already seemed determined to abandon, begins to confuse him, to dazzle him with a heartbreaking truth. Lisa is everything he made of her. Lisa is, for Michael, all the symbolic burden that himself, unconsciously, as Anstoß, did deposit in her.
Our Lisa, so charming and authentic, tells with the same blind illusion of the fool taxi driver of the airport, the wonders that the zoo of the city of Cincinatti holds. How can the speeches of beings which, in the first instance, seemed so different, be confused so cruelly?
David Thewlis in Anomalisa (2015), a co-production of Paramount Animation, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries. Photography courtesy of Paramount Pictures, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries.
Michael's disappointment, not by accident, comes to the surface through dreams. Notice Kauffman's psychoanalytic wink. The psychotic desires of a pathologically homogeneous, sterile and futile universe are manifested through a call from the hotel manager who operates as a catalyst for the last turning point that invites us to the climax of the film. The manager is not a man, but all men, his subordinates are not women, but all women. Such a reality cannot be accepted candidly without resistance. It demands, as it appears in the feature film, a frenzied escape. But evasion, as we know, often leads to a recognition of the lack, that is to say, it usually unmasks us. Michael loses, unceremoniously, his own face, that was, according to him, distinguished and special, in the midst of the maelstrom in which his escape is taking place in search of the Lisa, his imaginary Lisa, of the previous night. Everything consists in admitting the fragility of our identity. Remember the moment when, after taking a shower (in which Kauffman suggestively shows us, for the first time, the naked body of a middle-aged man), Michael see himself in the mirror? His face, the one that conferred a certain differentiated identity, wants to mutate violently to adapt to the environment he has felt desperately misunderstood by. Woody Allen's Abe Lucas, though dimly, would say it's scary when you run out of distractions.
After this we witness, like Riggan Thomson or Tyler Durden, the descent into hell of a ruined human being. The perplexed and disconnected conference, the ultimate reason (although as trivial and superfluous as the one that links him to the members of his own family) for which, in the first place, he had traveled from California to Ohio, shows us the spectacle of a collapse. The psychic struggle that usually ends on the paradoxical crossroads of a defeat of the victorious faction.
David Thewlis in Anomalisa (2015), a co-production of Paramount Animation, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries. Photography courtesy of Paramount Pictures, HanWay Films, Harmonious Claptrap, Snoot Entertainment and Starburn Industries.
It closes then with a return home. The illusion of finding something different. The absurd gift of a father who insists on believing in his responsibility and obligation. The innocence of the child and the scandalous provenance of the Japanese artifact. After a succinct discussion with Donna, his wife, Michael sits on the house staircase, which is no longer his, to contemplate the celebration that his intimate circle has prepared to honor him. That has been too much. He knows he is as out of place as the oriental melody that accompanies his tribulations.