Metaphysics on a small scale

By Katherine Monk

That Charlie Kaufman sure likes words. And the bigger the better: there’s more conjunctive sinew to pull apart in his game of deconstruction.

If you saw Synecdoche, New York – an entirely bizarre story of a man and a scale model city — you understand the tortured lengths Kaufman will go to in order to play with language, just so he can play with your head.

So before you even walk into Anomalisa, you know two things: It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie pivoting on a pun, and it’s got puppets. If you’ve been paying attention to social media, you know it also has a sex scene, but we’ll get to that later, because Kaufman is the kind of storyteller who works best through a slow, intellectual seduction.

The first thing he strokes is our inner child. Through the mere act of creating an entire world that is recognizable, yet entirely in miniature, we’re thrown back into the sandbox of youth, where doll houses and GI Joe’s tactical equipment provided an open door to another world.

We can’t help ourselves from gazing at the miniature staplers and airport stanchions, the window treatments and the tailored clothing. It’s all a perfect replica, but we can still tell it’s small – if only for the width of the thread and stitching.

Every banal object is reduced to scale, and suddenly, acquires new meaning in the process. It’s a weird transformation, and Kaufman and his stop-motion directing partner Duke Johnson leverage it for maximum dramatic purpose by applying the same god-like gaze to people.

Our pint-sized protagonist is Michael Stone, a state-of-the-art live action armature voiced by David Thewlis. Michael is the author of a self-help book for sales people. He travels to mid-size cities for speaking dates at the local Ramada Inn. His big line is finding something unique about someone you meet, remembering his or her name, and making that person feel special.

Yet, for all of Michael’s talk, he’s beginning to see everyone as the same – literally. Everyone around Michael has the exact same face and the exact same voice, whether they are male or female, adult or infant. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare, with a Kaufman grin.

What makes it all possible is 3D printing technology. Ever since the producers of ParaNorman figured out how to translate digital rendering into stop-motion footage using printed facial expressions, the world of animation changed. Everything could be miniaturized and replicated with laser precision.

Kaufman could have made Michael Stone a superhero that could stop a train or lift a house, but he decided to harness all that power to recreate a beige hotel room and an ordinary man suffering from a tragically ordinary problem: Michael Stone doesn’t want to be ordinary, but he is.

That’s where the genius of this movie lies: It taps into the everyday existential angst that screams we’re small and insignificant. Michael Stone seems undeniably small and insignificant, and everyone around him looks generic until he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman from the local conference.

She sounds different from everybody else. She has a voice that rings in his ears and makes his steeple gong. To Michael, she is a holy creation that reaffirms his existence, makes him feel special, and shines a loving gaze on his budding shrine.

He seduces this female anomaly with his romantic intensity. Then, Michael and Anoma-lisa have puppet intercourse. Now, it’s not the first time this has been done – thank you, Matt Stone and Trey Parker who gave us Team America: World Police – but it’s the first time puppet sex felt more real than movie sex.

Kaufman and Johnson’s angles are so unflattering and yet, so familiar, they make you shrivel in recognition. They show us bad hotel sex after too much drinking. It’s the most classic of pedestrian sins, but the duo captures it so realistically, that we can only stare and wonder: Do we all look this pathetic in god’s eyes?

Certainly, Michael Stone is a study of human flaws. Self-absorbed, unfaithful and desperate for a sense of purpose, he’s not a likable character. He’s quite miserable, in fact. The only thing that redeems him is an awareness of his own smallness, because in the end, that’s the only thing that redeems us – to god and to each other.

Kaufman leaves it up to the viewer to judge Michael Stone. After all, we’re bigger and more powerful than him. He’s just made of wire and digitally molded plastic bits, moved centimeter by centimeter by a larger hand. And yet, every painstaking action only reaffirms his humanity.

It’s a wonderfully precise exercise in miniaturist metaphysics, because the more we see ourselves in Michael, the more magical the world becomes. He is a doll, after all. And Kaufman tugs at our inner child throughout this bland, largely eventless detour into some schmuck’s mid-life crisis because he’s got pose-able joints. And all his parts.

We want to see what he can do and what adventures he will have. Tragically, our childlike curiosity brings us back to grown-up problems and a world that looks all too familiar, but that was the point of Anomalisa. How better to make us aware of the big picture than to make us small?

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, January 15, 2016

-30-