'Anomalisa' review: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson make the year's best, most quintessential film

[yasr_overall_rating]

Has there ever been a movie that feels like it was made specifically for you? As if the planets aligned just right, the gods were pleased with you enough and they granted you something so wonderfully, specifically impacting, personal and meaningful, that all it needed to do was wait for you to get floored by it in due time? It doesn’t happen often. Sometimes, it'll never happen to some people. Even with nearly 300-400 movies watched in a single year, I only find this fleeting feeling once every now-and-again — perhaps every five-or-so years, if I'm lucky. But bless Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson and their latest film, Anomalisa. For that’s exactly what I feel they have given me here, and the gift comes very, very, very well received.

Their 90-minute, Kickstarter-funded, proudly adult stop-motion wonder is a joy unlike many others. It’s an extravagant look into the bizarrely normal and the normally bizarre. It’s a marvel of a production, a creation of skilled animators and puppeteers creating some of the best — if not the best — animation I’ve ever seen, stop-motion or otherwise. It’s a touchingly patient piece of fiction and fact that doesn’t let its morose characters get in the way of pure wonder and amazement is a pleasure in-and-of itself. It’s a stunningly simplistic story that — like the best Kaufman films, the screenwriter behind modern classics like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation, a personal favorite of mine — lets its complexity unfold in diligence, often not taking its full toll until you’re well past the comfy comforts of your theater seat.

It’s a treat and a deceit. It’s a treasure you want to explore and unravel for hours on end. It’s a wonderfully original piece of cinematic at its craftiest and most thoughtfully intercut. It’s the kind of film that left me literally paralyzed in my seat after I watched it. It’s the kind of movie that physically left me shaking — without exaggeration — for hours afterwards. It’s the work of pure, genuinely genius — the kinds of which I’ve hardly truly seen, or experienced, prior. It’s a spellbinding piece of work that left me absolutely speechless in its amazement. And it’s absolutely, positively the best film I’ve seen from 2015. No doubt. But it could also — very well — be the best film I’ve seen in this current, ongoing decade. If there’s a better film left to behold, I welcome it with open arms. Its excellence may leave me in a permanent state of intoxication if such a film exists.

But what story could possibly produce such violently strong emotions? What kind of god-like wonder would possibly elicit such a visceral response? What kind of characters could possibly produce such unflinching emotions on my behalf? Quite frankly, the kind you’d least expect. It focuses on the kind of people that — beyond being puppets —would never make you look twice if you saw them at the airport, or at a restaurant, or in a hotel room near you. And that’s entirely, completely the point. Anomalisa follows Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a lonely, middle-aged Los Angeles self-help author traveling to a conference in Cincinnati and living in a world where everyone, including his wife and son, has the voice of Tom Noonan. He’s lost in a sea of melancholic mundanity, forced to spend his night in Ohio smoking and drinking away from the mini-bar in his vacant room at the Fregoli Hotel.

He’s a miserable, prickly piece of work. He’s never so much lost as never quite found. He gives people advice, but, of course, he doesn’t know how exactly he can help himself. I know this all sounds familiar, and even a little contrite. But that’s the point in many respects; it taps into something familiar and despairingly aching in us all. It creates this fantastically constructed and vividly detail-oriented world only to have us see what we already know, and what some of us already feel. But the beauty and the magnificence come from the symmetry between the painfully recognizable and fantastically singular. It merges the path between the felt and the unseen in such acute, unimaginably striking ways that it’s astounding how real it all feels, how lived it all seems —even if none of this has ever been alive at all.

Michael’s failure to connect to himself has clearly affected how he’s come to terms with others. He’s never gotten realized what he wanted or what he needed until months, even years after the fact. A former flame comes to visit him and makes him realize this all-so-directly. Mismatch interests with a chatty cab driver come as a bruising reminder that he can’t even pretend to relate, or simply correspond, with completely stranger on the simplest of matters like the zoo and its "zoo-size." His inability to get what he wants from a not-quite-kid-friendly toy store nearby shows he’s always searching in this world, but never quite finding what he wants for — or from — others. He can't even get what he wants from the door to his hotel room, having to shove his key in again and again and again until it finally lets him in. How this man was able to put together a book to motivate others is practically a mystery. How that book sold as many copies as we’re lead to believe is especially unfathomable. But such are the distinctly realized worlds from the mind of Kaufman, Anomalisa’s sole screenwriter.

So why are we following Michael through this particularly ordinary adventure? Because things don’t always come as naturally as we expect, and nothing is ever plain from Kaufman. Drowning from the waves of ordinary day-to-day similarities, Michael discovers a fresh breath of air exiting a nightly shower: an original voice. Literally! And one that comes from his hotel neighbor Lisa Hesselman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) — who splurges on her savings along with her work friend/childhood buddy, Emily, to hear Michael speak after being so profoundly impacted by his book. Lisa isn’t like many people, for reasons beyond just her unique speaking voice. She’s a physically, and emotionally, scarred introvert who doesn’t know a lot of big words and tends to keep a low profile. But there’s nothing particularly remarkable about her, and that’s partially what attracts Michael to her.

She’s hiding only from herself, not what people conceive of her. She’s more afraid of what she could do wrong than trying to find ways to make other people right. She’s less selfish than she is timorous and unsure of what anyone could really see special about her at all. And in the richly woven world of fragile loneliness and considerate idiosyncratic that is Anomalisa, that’s more than enough for Michael and Lisa to find some singularity in their fractured personalities.

Anomalisa is very much an anomaly and a normality all at once. It’s almost painfully relatable at times, but you never, ever want your eyes to waver from the screen. It’s a traditional late-period love story told in the most exceptional of ways, inviting well-tuned insight and amazingly accurate conversations to unfold at each and every moment, while never divorcing itself from the truly cinematic or the extremely rich visual presentation here (Did I mind how incredible the animation is in this?). It invites us to see characters we’ve always known, at least to an extent, and gives us insight we never knew we so desperately needed. Kaufman and Johnson’s film is movie-making at its most philosophically sound, its most poignantly moving and its most powerfully human. Even if it doesn’t feature a single damn one, just like the poster says.

Anomalisa is an essential piece of cinema — the kind of work you’d only dream to existence and the kind you pray to your luckiest star is as good as it is. There's so much be behold in this, and so much to dwell on and dissect. But it's ultimately one of those movies you need to experience. It's one you need to feast your eyes on and let its every-man intelligence bask in its full glory. Don't pirate this movie. Don't cheat yourself from seeing it the way it should be seen. Run to the theater to see this as soon as you possibly can. Don't let this one slip away from you. It’s a treasure and a dream, a reality you known and yet never quite seen before. And the kind of film — stop-motion or otherwise — that you never want to stop moving you.

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