Anomalisa

Anomalisa is the latest film from Charlie Kaufman—writer of Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and writer/director of Synecdoche, New York (2008). The stop-motion film, co-directed by animator Duke Johnson, is based on Kaufman’s 2005 radio play of the same name. The filmmakers use puppets to tell the story of lonely self-help author Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) who perceives everyone in his life as virtually identical. All the people he meets, be they male or female look the same and are all voiced by Tom Noonan. Life is pretty blasé and melancholy for Michael until he meets a unique woman named Lisa in a Cincinnati hotel. Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa and her casting couldn’t be more perfect. While the picture is too chilly for the first third and too fatalistic in the last third, there’s a middle section in there that’s deeply moving and about as human as a film starring wooden puppets can get.