Anomalisa

Michael Stone (David Thewlis) has written a book about customer service, and he is flying to Cincinnati to tell a hall of people who work in call centres how to be nicer on the phone. He is not nice himself. He is tired, snappish and adrift, and the film’s first idea, stated before he has left the aeroplane, is that everyone he meets has the same face and the same voice. The man in the next seat, the taxi driver, the desk clerk, his wife and son on the phone: all Tom Noonan, mild and patient and interchangeable. Charlie Kaufman wrote it and directs with Duke Johnson, in stop-motion, with puppets, and it is the clearest thing he has made since Being John Malkovich. We recommend it warmly, with one reservation about whose side it is on.

The puppets are the film. Kaufman and Johnson have left the seams in: a line runs across each brow and down the jaw where the plates of the face join, and nobody has painted it out. The effect is of people who might come apart. Joe Passarelli shoots the hotel with a shallow focus and the flat, warm light of a bedside lamp, so the beige room looks like a real room in a real airport hotel rather than a set. John Joyce and Huy Vu’s production design gets the details that matter: the key card that will not work, the ice bucket, the corridor with the same door repeated to the vanishing point. Susan Donym puts Michael in a grey suit.

Thewlis gives Michael a voice worn down to a mutter, and the puppet’s small movements, a hand rubbing the back of a neck, a drink poured with too much care, do the rest. Noonan’s voice is the film’s joke, and it becomes frightening. He never raises it. The ex-girlfriend Michael rings and meets in the bar, the bellboy who will not stop talking, the desk clerk: all are pleasant, all are the same, and by the twentieth exchange we felt something close to panic on Michael’s behalf, and then something worse, because the film has already suggested the sameness is his doing. Kaufman plays the trick without a word of explanation.

Then Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) speaks through the wall. Leigh plays her as a woman who apologises before she has finished a sentence and assumes any man nearby would prefer her friend. She has driven in with a colleague to hear Michael talk, and she cannot believe he has knocked on her door. The scene in which she sings to him, in his room, unaccompanied, is the one most likely to disarm a sceptic. It disarmed us. Carter Burwell keeps his score to a few piano notes around it and lets Leigh’s thin, honest singing carry the weight.

What follows, in the same room, is a sex scene between two puppets. We braced for the laugh. It never comes. Kaufman and Johnson play it slowly, awkwardly, with the lights on, and Garret Elkins holds his shots long enough for the fumbling to turn into tenderness. It moved us more than most sex scenes between actors have, and we think we know why: the puppets cannot perform desire, so the animators have had to build it out of hesitation, and hesitation is what we recognise from our own lives.

Now the reservation. Michael is a self-pitying man who has hurt people and will hurt more, and the film knows it. But it also finds him the most interesting person in Cincinnati, and the second half, which takes a turn we will not describe, is more curious about his dread than about the woman he has spent the night with. Some critics read the last movement as a deliberate cruelty: a good night does not cure a bad man. We agree that is the point. We still think the film enjoys making it slightly more than it should, and that Lisa deserved a picture that stayed with her a minute longer.

Against Kaufman’s own work it is the simplest: one man, one hotel, one night. Synecdoche, New York needed a whole collapsing city to say what this says with a seam in a puppet’s face. At 91 minutes it is the right length, and it carries its 15 certificate for good reason. Watch it alone, late, in a room with a minibar, and try not to check whether the receptionist sounds like the taxi driver.