Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion romanceAnomalisa is a treat for curious minds
Art-house Anomaly
By Tom Meek
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich,Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has always been something of an art-house anomaly when it comes to delivering quirky curios that sate the highbrow quest for something different and challenging. His latest, Anomalisa, certainly fits the bill.
The film is a stop motion-animation journey into the psyche of a self-centered motivational speaker who may or may not suffer from some form of psychosis. It’s slow moving and mundane yet profoundly unearthly as it plumbs the human condition and the eternal quest for fulfillment.
The project, which Kaufman originally conceived as a sound play (think a podcast or radio) for composer Carter Burwell and the Coen Brothers, came to life via a Kickstarter campaign and a partnership with stop-motion animator Duke Johnson, a man with such credits as Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole on his CV.
The rendering of place and people — the puppets were made in part from a 3-D printer — are astonishing in the degree of detail and craftsmanship, especially the miniature sets which are limited to the inside of a hotel, an airplane, a cab, and a dildo bodega. The overall effect becomes a stirringly piquant amalgam that’s something like The Polar Express meets Team America: World Police.
The cast too is limited — there are just three performers. David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh voice the two leads, while character actor Tom Noonan speaks for everyone else — women, men, and children. It’s a strange olio shoehorned into a rather regular tread as Michael Stone (Thewlis), a customer service expert, British ex-pat, and something of a minor celeb (author ofHow May I Help You Help Them?), flies into Cincinnati to give one of his speeches at a convention. Everything is a bit off as Michael lands. The male singers behind the choral music on his iPod are horribly out of sync. Everyone speaks with the same voice (Noonan’s) and has the same general facial profile regardless of age, gender, or physical size. And when he gets in a cab desperate for a cigarette, there’s a no smoking sign because the driver is asthmatic.
Everything moves in small, sleepy slices like that, but the film is rife with tension, mostly between Michael’s ears. The name of the hotel that Michael checks into, the Al Fregoli is a tell, and early on we learn Michael has an angry ex-lover, a wife, and child back home in L.A. he’s detached from, and a high opinion of himself. Besides observing a man masturbating in an office across the way and an ill-advised drink with an old flame, nothing really extraordinary happens in Cincinnati. But then Michael meets Lisa (Leigh). Continue reading
The title refers to one who returns from the dead or a long absence. Some definitions have it as a ghost or specter, and all are apt in Iñárritu’s ordeal of great suffering. Right from the start, blood gets spilled as a party of American fur trappers in the early 1800s is beset by Arikara warriors. Viewers, like the furriers, don’t see the Native American detachment coming until the visceral twang of a well-guided arrow sails across the screen and pierces the throat of an unwary skinner. Being at the mercy of a largely unseen assailant registers eerily like the band of mercenaries in “Predator” being picked off one by one by a near-invisible alien force.
“Joy” marks more of the same – not a bad thing, as it features the ever determined yet effervescent Jennifer Lawrence, back under Russell’s instruct for the third time. But even given Lawrence’s vast talents, is the invention of the Miracle Mop as worthy a fact-based feature as “The Fighter” and “American Hustle”? It’s all about scale. “The Fighter” was rooted in the hardscrabble world of boxing, opioid addiction and the tawdry cauldron of the struggling working class, while “Hustle” reveled in the cheesy polyester fashion and over-the-top personas of the late ’70s. Here, Lawrence is on her own to pull the yoke as the titular inventor of the now-famous mop, but oddly enough (copyright issues?) the name “Miracle Mop” never gets mentioned, though the real-life Joy Mangano does serve as an executive producer. One can only assume her endorsement.
Back in 2010, Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” made a point of big money’s deep connections to the White House, regulatory agencies and academia. Who ran Capital Hill didn’t matter; red and blue allegiances were irrelevant as long as the talk on the table was about more green. McKay’s “Short” homes in on the gamblers who profited from that giant economic sucking sound, those who were alert to the rigging of the system and rampant neglect and, in the end, opted to hedge it. You could call them visionaries or vultures and both would be true; the film, however, paints them as more accidental heroes, opportunists and scientists who saw the sky falling and, when no one took them too seriously, put their money where their mouth was.
Like the first theatrically released chapter back in 1977, we begin on a dusty, barren planet – this one called Jakku, and more junkyard than outpost. Time-wise we’re about 30 years out from “Return of the Jedi,” and a Resistance fighter (Oscar Isaac, showing some comic flair) and his beeping beach ball of a droid (the adorable BB-8, who’s been getting all the prerelease press) possess a secret hologram map to deliver to Resistance HQ. The info will allegedly guide the holder to Skywalker so the object of the title can be achieved and the Evil Empire – now known as the First Order – can be weakened and its tyrannical chains cast off. But before any of that happens Jakku is assailed by Imperial Stormtroopers, and BB-8 and the map fall in with a scrappy scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley, showing the resolve of Katniss Everdeen) who’s pretty good at hand-to-hand and has a mysterious childhood that spills back to her in ghostly shards. 
That’s not to say “Macbeth” is all a mess. It offers a rapturous staging of the battle of Ellon, righteous in its fury, and boasts two of the best and most interesting actors working in film today, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. But Fassbender, so alive with spit and rage in “12 Years a Slave,” feels muted here, lacking the enunciating articulation that Kenneth Branagh rebranded as the standard when as a young man he ingeniously resurrected “Henry V” in 1989. There’s a dull detachment that one could attribute to the amount of blood spilled at Ellon. The three scribes (a scribe for every witch) who adapt Shakespeare’s timeless tale of tragedy, avarice and madness (Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie) imbue Macbeth with a son, who is gone before he even speaks during the opening carnage.
“Trumbo,” based on the book by Bruce Cook, shows the screenwriter’s triumphs and tribulations while on the “list.” It’s a snarky look at a period when right-wing fear mongering – akin to today’s strong immigration/terrorism rhetoric – reigned supreme and liberalism was equated with Communism and anti-American sentiment. The film, directed by Jay Roach of “Meet the Parents” and “Austin Powers” fame, plays light and fast, a benefit to something that could have been a somber slog, but it also lacks breadth. The focus of the film centers on the newly blacklisted Trumbo, his outlandish shenanigans (he wrote “Exodus,” “Roman Holiday” and “Spartacus” behind the scenes, using pen names) and the state of paranoia and complacency sweeping the country.
