Comfortably numb

I'm always telling people that Arkansas gets a lot of movies it probably shouldn't, but for whatever reason one of the best and most important American films released last year never played in the state. Somehow Anomalisa, a terrifically affecting stop-motion animation film about the human condition, missed us. It became available on iTunes this week and should be available on DVD and through other digital sources soon.

As you may (or may not) have noticed, we quietly dropped the ­MovieStyle rubric from this section a little while ago. And we have massaged our mission statement -- we're no longer laser-focused on writing about the movies that arrive in Arkansas theaters each week, but we've taken notice of reality. A lot of what we still think of as movies are consumed at home or somewhere other than a traditional movie theater. We carry screens in our pocket -- I watch movies on my iPad at the gym. In this environment it would be odd to confine ourselves to the play of light and sound in particular brick and mortar venues. We love our theaters, which we believe are still the optimal way to consume a movie, but our beat is larger than that.

I'm not going to ignore one of the best and most important films of the past couple of years just because it didn't get booked in a theater.

You've probably heard about Anomalisa, and maybe you've seen a trailer for it. It is a kind of puppet show, the story of a man trapped in his own skin, his own life. I could make a case that it's a not-so-covert rewriting of Jean Paul-Sartre's No Exit, the 1944 existentialist French play that introduced us to the phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres (hell is other people).

Maybe that's not the way to describe it. How about I say it's the story of a depressive motivational speaker who spends a troubled night in a high-end Cincinnati hotel, probably committing what some people would characterize as a date rape? Intrigued now? No?

Well, maybe I'll just ask you to trust me on this. Anomalisa is a fascinating and moving piece of cinema. It's funny and sad and scarier than any of those movies where demons or monsters pop out at you. It's startlingly original, which might make sense when you consider it is written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplays for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, which a lot of people like.

(He also wrote and directed the postmodern horror film Synecdoche, New York, which not a lot of people saw and even fewer liked, though -- fair warning -- I loved it.)

Anomalisa begins with an airliner's descent into Cincinnati, a place that holds some bad memories for Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), motivational speaker and British ex-pat. A decade earlier, Stone had a relationship with Bella, a woman who now lives in Cincinnati, and that relationship ended badly, though he has vague hopes of seeing her again, to repair the past maybe, or just to provide himself a little comfort.

After a cab ride and check-in at his luxe hotel -- sequences that through the magic of stop-motion photography are transposed from banal to uncanny -- he phones and endures a bad meeting with his ex in the hotel bar. But then he's taken by a woman, a call-center worker named Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), who turns out to be an unlikely fan of Stone's books. She has spent more than she can afford to attend his seminar, sharing a room with a girlfriend she assumes is more attractive and smarter.

But Michael is interested in Lisa, who seems to him more real than everyone else in the world. For Michael's numbed perspective, all humanity looks and sounds the same. All characters, save for Michael and Lisa are voiced by veteran character actor Tom Noonan, who gives them all the same smooth customer-service lilt while manifesting a wide emotional range -- Michael's wife scolds him and the bellboy points out the features of his junior suite in the same complaisant voice.

Though Michael convinces himself he's genuinely taken with Lisa, he can't help but come off as condescending to her. The title comes from a conversation in which they discuss the word "anomaly," and the common self-deception humans commit when they think themselves special. When Michael calls Lisa Anomalisa he might be teasing her -- she worries that she's too dull to discern his cruelty. And when they have sex -- in a scene that is tender and disturbing -- we understand the depths of Michael's desperation, how damaged and dangerous he has become.

But somehow Anomalisa manages to end on a somewhat upbeat note, with a joke about the toy Michael has brought home from the trip. But then it's over, and you feel it evaporating, like a dream. It leaves you with a vague, lonely feeling. It somehow feels like a night spent on someone else's dime in one of those overly comfortable four-stars. There's nothing like easy ennui to make you want to scream.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 03/18/2016