Anomalisa

Saw Anomalisa, a rare Charlie Kaufman movie with no recursive or self-referential elements. It follows some guy who wrote a management book or something who is now the keynote speaker at a conference. Far from being confident and happy, everything strikes him as tedious and mundane. The film follows him as he has a sort-of breakdown while at the conference.

Apparently this movie started life as a short film and grew into a 90 minute feature. You can kind of tell. The plot is fairly brief, so the story telling sort of takes its time and establishes (as an example) the main character's burgeoning depression many times in many ways. The ending is not as uplifting as might be hoped but more realistic after all and not exactly depressing either. A Kaufman-esque acceptance that life is less than perfect and yet more than good enough.

The film is short in stop animation with puppets who are all voiced by Tom Noonan (he is credited as "everyone else"). This strongly evokes the everyone-is-John-Malkovich scene from Being John Malkovich despite being unrelated. It makes for some nice audio gags however, such as when the main character is listening to some pretty opera only to hear Noonan groaning out the piece in a indifferent tone.

So, not as fun a film as I'd hoped. Overly long and not very uplifting, it is very different, but that's all it is.