Sunday, March 20, 2016

Anomalisa (2015)

Directors: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Writer:      Charlie Kaufman
Cast:         Davide Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan

A man crippled by the mundanity of his life experiences something out of the ordinary.

The theme of the film is 'Fregoli Delusion', a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. The film achieves it by having all the characters in it, except for two of them, being voiced by Tom Noonan. The hotel that the main character checks in is named Fregoli. It is the film that Charlie Kaufman wanted to fund through Kickstarter and was conceived as a 40 minute one. But the end version is 90 minutes long and you really feel that it would have been more suitable as a forty minutes project. I really can't understand all the hype its getting. It is a good watch but is comparatively a light-weight project from Kaufman after 'Synecdoche New-York'. It is in stop-motion animation format and it is not as if it is groundbreaking. Richard Linklater handled it ages ago with two excellent films that were also rich in content- A Scanner Darkly & A Waking Life. Anomalisa's story of a man going through mid-life crisis seems a bit simplistic in comparison. 

Overall, it is a good watch but it would have worked better as a short film. It seems Kaufman decided to play it quite safe after he went full retard with 'Synecdoche New-York', which was fucking excellent even though I didn't have much clue about what was going on. One silver-lining is that there is a good rendering of 'Girls just want to have some fun' in Anomalisa. 

Rating: 3/5

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