Anomalisa: an incompletely developed film on alienation and the struggle to live in an oppressive conformist society

Charlie Kaufmann and Duke Johnson, “Anomalisa” (2015)

Not often does a film come along that encapsulates in its appearance and format its themes of human alienation, rootlessness, loss of identity and individuality and fear of the same, and the lack of authenticity in modern Western civilisation. By telling its story through animation and the use of three voice actors, two to voice individual characters and the third actor (Tom Noonan) to voice all other characters, “Anomalisa” says something about how modern society has robbed people of their uniqueness and crushes them with a banal, insincere culture through a particular if rather biased and narrow point of view, that being of its main character Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) who himself embodies much of what is trite and troubling about the society he lives in.

British expat Stone is a motivational speaker and author based in Los Angeles whose recent book on customer service has become a best-seller and who has been invited to speak at a conference in Cincinnati, a city in the industrial rust-bucket Midwest region of the US. On the plane there, he re-reads a 10-year-old letter sent him by his old girlfriend Bella who happens to live in his destination city. After landing at the airport in the evening, he endures vapid chatter from the taxi driver who takes him from the airport to the four-star Hotel Fregoli (the name is taken from a mental disorder in which the sufferer imagines everyone to look and sound the same) whose stodgy interiors and furnishings resemble those of a prison, albeit a comfortable one. He calls his wife and son and engages in dull stereotyped conversation with them. He contacts Bella and they meet in the hotel bar – for the first time in over 10 years – but she is still upset over their break-up and she carries considerable psychological baggage from her recent relationship which has also broken up and the two former lovers separate in anger and distress. Michael then saunters off to find the toy-shop the taxi driver had told him about – and which turns out to be a toy-shop for adults – to buy a present for his son.

Back at the hotel and feeling depressed – it’s late at night by now – Michael meets two young women who have travelled all the way by car from their small-town call-centre jobs to see and hear him speak at the conference. Emily is just like everyone else he meets but her companion Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is another thing altogether: her face a bit disfigured and hidden under a thick irregularly shaped mop of hair, having had a limited education and suffering from low self-esteem, Lisa is not at all what Michael has come to expect of Americans in all their commonplace conformity. She speaks what’s on her mind (out of nervousness perhaps), admits that she likes Cyndi Lauper and, after some persuasion from Michael, sings Lauper’s biggest hit “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” right off the bat. The older man is smitten with Lisa’s charm and after drinks with the two girls, manages to persuade her to come back to his room with him. One thing leads to another and next thing you know – after a brief detour into a dream scene that might riff on current American fears about pervasive surveillance and the possibility of being blackmailed or arrested for associating with people different from yourself – Michael and Lisa are having breakfast together. At this point, Michael looks at Lisa anew … and the day ahead (the conference, the return home, family reunion) starts to unravel.

The film moves at a fair clip covering what is basically mundane material – a jaded and depressed middle-aged man goes on a business trip, preys on a young woman and has a one-night stand with her – which it uses to explore its themes of alienation and trying to survive as an authentic being in a society of stifling conformity. The audience comes to realise that Michael’s depression and alienation are as much a result of past refusal to take personal responsibility and an unwillingness to listen to and connect with others, as demonstrated early on in his failed reunion with the fragile Bella, as it is of the machine-like soulless corporate nature of American society. A couple of scenes in the film in which his identity appears to be fragmenting and falling apart to reveal the robot beneath highlight the depth of his depression and the fragility of the identity that he has. The fact that Michael is not American-born might give a hint of his rootlessness which might lie at the bottom of his feelings of alienation; one would like to know something of his childhood and youth that led him to flee Britain and go to Los Angeles, that citadel of reinvention and manufactured identity.

For all his search for authenticity, as represented by Lisa, Michael’s reaction to it turns out to be depressingly selfish and banal: he tries to possess it and Lisa through sex and fantasises about leaving his wife and son and shacking up with Lisa. The breakfast scene is significant in that signs of incompatibility between Michael and Lisa appear as Michael starts picking on Lisa’s eating habits and Lisa’s voice increasingly changes to those of everyone else around Michael. The scene breaks off midway through and the audience does not see what happens next, which some viewers may consider a major weakness of the film, but it should not be hard to guess that Michael and Lisa start arguing and break up in almost the same way that he broke up with Bella all those years ago. Fortunately, for all her hang-ups about her appearance and her lack of confidence, Lisa is not as fragile as Bella and treasures the evening she spent with Michael. For his part, Michael returns to the existential hell that he in part has made for himself.

The film dwells very little on why US society has become so oppressively conformist although Kaufmann and Johnson do include one remarkable moment in which a confused and disoriented Michael, giving his address to the conference, goes off script and starts railing against the US government and its foreign policy, and declares that the world “is falling apart”, at which point his audience begins booing. This can only further alienate Michael from the people and country that he calls home, and this is as daring as Kaufmann and Johnson come in suggesting that the entire US nation is living in an alternative universe far removed from authenticity and reality. Michael later dutifully returns to his wife who has put on a home-warming celebration but to him everybody there is a robot looking exactly the same as all the other robots he knows.

The film’s narrative does appear incomplete at times and the action can appear forced. It is odd that Emily allows her sexually inexperienced friend to go off with a much older man and the brief affair is rather creepy. The breakfast and conference address sequences are woefully incomplete and we do not know whether Michael’s woozy performance of a speech (which he has probably delivered hundreds of times before) has ruined his career as a motivational speaker and writer. The film gives no sense of closure as the characters return to their everyday lives and routines, perhaps never to meet again. Given the themes though, the incomplete nature of the plot and underdeveloped ideas might be considered part and parcel of what the film aims to achieve: how to cope and survive in a society whose true horrific nature we have only a fragmented knowledge of, with not much in our arsenal save force of habit, our self-centredness, desire for immediate gratification, and the need to please and to conform as our weapons against evil.