Anomalisa (2015)

Anomalisa opens with a shot of an airplane moving through the clouds. We can hear the voices of various people before the camera pulls back and reveals that we were seeing through the window of another airplane, and from the perspective of the main character, Michael Stone.  Michael is a quasi-famous expert on customer service traveling to Cincinnati to give a lecture to some business professionals.

Like many, many films, Anomalisa suggests that everything we see is part of a character's unreliable perspective.  This opening scene sets the stage for the symbolic device that dominates the film.  All but two characters in the film, regardless of age or sex, have the same face and Tom Noonan's voice.  Only Michael and the film's title character, Lisa, are unique.  Something is seriously wrong with how Michael receives other people.

After landing in Cincinnati, Michael checks in at the Fregoli Hotel, where the rest of the film takes place.  This is a reference to the Fregoli delusion, a mental disorder that causes the victim to believe that all other people are actually the same person taking on different appearances.  This is often accompanied by paranoia.  Of course, the film does not actually imply Michael suffers from this condition.  Its symptoms are just a metaphor.  To Michael, stuff like small talk and the rote pleasantries of customer service are unbearable.  I have witnessed few characters in cinema who are so thoroughly annoyed by little things people do every day.  So, everyone he sees has the same face and everyone he hears has the same voice.

That said, their small talk is a little exaggerated.  The other characters he speaks to, with the partial exception of Lisa, repeat stock phrases, say ridiculous and redundant things, or transparently act in self-centered ways.  That Michael hates them so much might be due to something more than just a bad attitude.

The burden of an analytical mind is a mainstay of Kaufman's films.  We see it in Synecdoche, New York, in which the main character Caden Cotard struggles to explicate everything in life at deeper and deeper levels and fears he'll die before he can achieve that.  We see it in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which the central couple damage their relationship by constantly reading into each other's actions.  Michael's struggle is revealed in an early scene where he meets with an ex-girlfriend from 10 years before: we learn that they parted on bad terms, and his meeting with her does nothing to fix this.  She leaves in anger once again, with Michael calling after her that he just wants to understand.

Maybe Michael is just a misanthrope, and this is all in his head.  The reference to the Fregoli delusion implies this.  Then again, obscure and fleeting references cannot really be said to do much work in films.  More importantly: who could possibly care if that was all there was to this film?

Well, Michael is an expert on customer service and sales.  In one scene, he gives a speech in which he tries to remind salespeople that everyone is unique and has a story behind them ("everyone has had a day," he says).  What Michael says in that scene sounds more like platitudes than anything else, and the film knows this, making it an uncomfortable, stumbling affair.  It's funny that lines from this scene were used in the trailer, presumably to misrepresent this film as a tender romance instead of what it is.  

Portraying these lines as corporate slop would be the film's best joke, if it actually believed that the people target by that are above it.  But it doesn't. The people Michael meets actually are very banal, as far as we can tell. 

Much like the rest of Kaufman's filmography, I'd assume the film seeks pathos in Michael's discomfort over the barriers between different minds.  It's one of Kaufman's recurring concerns.  He physically climbs inside someone's head in Being John Malkovich.  It draws Synechdoche's Caden to keep revising his play.  Kaufman even struggles with understanding his own alter ego in Adaptation.  He often achieves substantial pathos from it, and I have to assume that his depiction of the world is at least true to his own experiences.  But I can't say I ever really felt the problem in his films.  My reaction has more been amusement at the creative ways he finds to depict it in extremely literal terms.  

Then again, we don't have to sympathize with Michael for some thematic reason.  We can sympathize with him just because he's having a bad time.  Any film which depicts a character's sorrow and bafflement with his situation the way Anomalisa does with Michael would draw sympathy—that is, if that character weren't as unpleasant as Michael is.  Of course, unpleasant people still need sympathy.  But I find it hard to believe Anomalisa cares when it doesn't portray anyone else as even competent to offer it to him.