Reality...what a concept!

One of the admirable things about Charlie Kaufman is that his work defies categorisation; you are never quite certain what he is going to come up with next. When he is at his best – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich – he produces excellent work. Even the misfires, and here I would include the much-praised Adaptation along with Synecdoche, New York, are more ambitious than lesser film makers at their best.

At the heart of Kaufman’s films is an exploration of the human condition; he is a genuinely existential film maker. Whether its Eternal Sunshine or Synecdoche his work concerns itself with big themes; identity, existence, what it means to be human.

Anomalisa is perhaps Kaufman’s most ambitious film to date; it fuses form and content in a way that has led some to describe it as a masterpiece. I wouldn’t go that far – some of the tone shifts are a bit sniggery for me – but this is a very fine piece of work.

I would go so far as to say it was robbed of an Oscar when the Best Animated Film award went to Inside Out. The Pixar film seems to have won by virtue of dealing with grown-up themes, albeit in a relatively juvenile way. Anomalisa deals with grown-up themes in an extremely adult way without the reassurance of a conventionally happy ending. It’s a haunting film that lingers long after you leave the cinema.

Kaufman uses stop-motion animation to tell his story of Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a motivational speaker who is in Cincinnati overnight to speak at a convention. Cincinnati is where he broke up with Bella, the love of his life, and he is haunted by the experience. Stone is in a fragile emotional state but he wants to get together with her even though he is not sure why.

The meeting goes badly, Bella storms out and Michael takes solace in cocktails. He then meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) a convention attendee and they have what is, for him, a life-changing fling. Lisa is physically scarred but it is obvious that her wounds are nowhere near as deep as Michael’s emotional scars.

Their relationship plays out with some wonderfully written dialogue and, even though they are stop motion figures, Michael and Lisa are much better realised than a lot of flesh and blood characters. The animation too creates a hazy, trippy effect which adds to Michael’s sense of dislocation.

Is he a man on the verge of a breakdown, or is this film the product of the breakdown? In the end it doesn’t matter. What is important is our engagement with the two principals. The strangeness of the surroundings forces you to pay attention to the dialogue and the vocal performances.

If this were live-action it would run the risk of being trite and conventional but here the form complements the content and elevates it the highest levels of film making craft.