Anomalisa (2015)

Anomalisa is a stop-motion puppet drama about Michael Stone, a motivational speaker who perceives every human being as the same face and voice until he encounters Lisa, a woman with a different sound. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson approach this conceit with painstaking craft. The puppets are 3D printed, the Cincinnati hotel is a temple of beige, and the melancholy is thick enough to spread on toast. It is an accomplished film. It is also, by the standards of contemporary social signaling, a nearly empty room.

Representation casting is not a project here. Three white actors supply the voices, and Tom Noonan voices everyone who is not Michael or Lisa, which is a conceptual joke, not a diversity initiative. LGBTQ themes do not appear. Racial consciousness does not appear. Climate concerns do not appear. The film has no interest in revising history. Lisa receives a measure of interiority and one moment of self-assertion, but the camera remains fixed on a self-absorbed man's perception of women, so the feminist reading is a faint pulse. Her facial scarring and her insecurity during intimacy are acknowledged, and Michael offers reassurance, but this is a minor beat in a larger study of his disappointment.

The film's psychological architecture is more substantial. Michael's condition resembles the Fregoli delusion, and the keywords include depression and antidepressants, though the illness functions as a plot device instead of advocacy. A climactic rant against the American government gestures at anti-capitalist feeling, but it is incoherent and brief. Kaufman's characteristic existential introspection gives the convention monologue a philosophical texture, and the film dramatizes its ideas instead of lecturing the audience on social issues. The result is a precise, sad, occasionally horrifying puppet show about a man who cannot connect. Its cultural conscience is not absent. It is simply occupied elsewhere.