Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman writes brilliant, stinging and insightful screenplays about love, life, relationships and the strange workings of the human mind. His best films, "Being John Malkovich," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and "Adaptation," manage to be both original and universal, probably because the films are so deeply personal. Kaufman's last feature, which he wrote and directed, was the maligned, misunderstood gem "Synecdoche, New York," which starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director on the verge of creative nirvana and personal destruction.

It's taken seven years for Kaufman to pen another film. He was actually working on a stage play which became the bracing and oddly exhilarating new animated feature, "Anomalisa," co-directed by Duke Johnson.

Animation? Has Charlie Kaufman made a children's film? Hardly.

These are stop-motion puppets. And they're very adult with adult feelings and adult foibles and adult idiosyncrasies. Oh, and adult sexual appetites. (I bet you've never seen an animated character wash his butt before! Or perform cunnilingus!)

The movie opens on a black screen with a cacophony of overlapping dialogue that builds to an unintelligible babble. We then meet Brit Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a writer who has flown into Cincinnati to give a motivational speech on customer service. Michael lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. As we watch his seemingly banal interactions with various people, we see that he's quite frustrated with life, his wife and basically everything and everyone. We also realize that every voice sounds exactly the same, even his wife and son.

Michael decides to look up Bella, an old love that he abandoned 11 years ago, who also sounds the same as everyone else, and is still hurt by his having left her. Things do not go as he planned.

While in his hotel he meets a chipper, if self-deprecating, woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who he says has a "miraculous" voice. Indeed -- since her voice is the lone, refreshingly different and feminine voice on the soundtrack of Michael's life (and the film). She's the anomaly in the title.

The two fall for one another and their passion burns deep, for a bit anyway, before the heartbreaking fickleness of human nature (and, in this case, the male nature) kicks in. Are we ever satisfied? Can we ever be happy with what we want once we get it?

"Anomalisa" is a fascinating film that haunts and leaves the viewer feeling simultaneously elated and dispirited.

Kaufman is ingenious at delving into the male psyche and distilling all the flaws and imperfections and reflecting them back to the audience in the most searingly honest manner.

The puppet bodies are beguiling in their simple and similar forms. And Thewlis and Leigh are wonderful, transcending the usual voice performance. Tom Noonan masterfully plays all the other voices.

The scene where Lisa plays, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" for Michael in both English (Cyndi Lauper) and Italian (Sarah Brightman) is a lovely representation of the early part of a relationship. It's filled with joy, hope, anxiety, desire and excitement. Alas, nothing lasts forever.

"Anomalisa" is a smart, fresh, melancholy mediation on the human need for love and companionship and the self-destructive forces that are ready to sabotage all good things, eventually.