It's been difficult for me to decide how I feel about Anomalisa. The film is in many ways fascinating and features some stunning and moving scenes. The animation is wonderfully detailed and the film has some really great jokes and comic scenes.
But the film doesn't fully work for me, and it has to do with the protagonist Michael Stone. The film's problem is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too. It wants us to care about Michael's happiness while presenting him as impossible to like. He's in every scene, and it is his unique perspective that we are privy to, as it becomes clear a few minutes into the film that Michael sees all other people with the same face and hears them with the same monotonic male voice. Here is the anonymizing aspect of our technocapitalism writ large. That Michael is an author and lecturer on customer service (who preaches that customers need to be treated as individuals, each of whom is having a good or bad day) is a nice ironic touch.
But Michael is very, very hard to like. Arriving in Cincinnati to deliver a talk, his interactions with airport personnel, cabdrivers, and hotel clerks are dripping with an exhausted disdain verging on hostility. He's haunted by thoughts of a former girlfriend, Bella, whom he ghosted years earlier. He impulsively calls her and they meet at the hotel bar; their interaction is already floundering before he pathetically asks her up to his room. She is horrified and storms out. After drinking to excess and remembering he wanted to buy a toy for his son, he wanders into a sex toy shop and purchases a bizarre Japanese sex antique. Up until this point, Michael has been shown as a character who cannot appreciate people as individuals; in fact, he cannot even perceive them as individuals. The film draws this concept from the Fregoli delusion, wherein the deluded perceives all other people as the same person. But the film struggles with inferring metaphoric universality to Michael's condition, especially after Lisa appears in the next act.
Michael is finishing a shower when he hears voices in the hall, including a female voice. Michael races with a maniacal zeal to get dressed and find the voice. It ends up belonging to Lisa, a customer service professional attending his talk with her friend Emma (who speaks in the male monotone). The three of them get drinks together, and though Emma is flirty and Lisa is shy, Michael is interested only in Lisa. This leads to a hilariously awkward scene where he's forced to ask Lisa in front of Emma if she would like to come have a nightcap with him in his room. Lisa can hardly understand, as she's never the one that men are attracted to.
As has been much written, Lisa is a wonderful character, whose positive energy and oddly un-self-conscious shyness shine via Jennifer Jason Leigh's voicework. In the great scene of the film, Lisa sings an a capella rendition of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," continuing on with the vocal coda despite Michael's premature interruption. Here Lisa is fully herself, performing at Michael's request, but really performing for the secret joy it brings to her. Her sex scene with Michael has been justly praised, but again, I felt the strength came from Lisa's tenderness. By this point in the film we know that Michael already has a wife and son that he lacks connection with, and that he has already struck out miserably with Bella. The sex scene really felt like punctuation after the singing scene.
Michael becomes even less pleasant from here on out, as he suffers through a paranoid dream, proposes that Lisa run off with him, and suffers a professional meltdown during his customer service lecture. In perhaps the saddest part of the film, after awaking from his dream, Michael convinces Lisa to run off with him, only to begin noticing (and pointing out) her flaws as she eats her breakfast. Soon he is hearing the male monotone doubling Lisa's voice. The only human connection that Michael has made in the whole film dies before our eyes, as he realizes she'll soon be like everyone else to him.
Obviously there's a valid, if extremely depressing, metaphor here for the human condition. Attraction fades, sparks disappear, former lovers become future nobodies. But while I felt sad for Lisa that her potentially exciting affair with Michael was not to be, I found it impossible to feel so for Michael. After all, he'd shown no redeeming characteristics at all in the entire film.
So was this to Anomalisa's benefit or detriment? I still haven't made up my mind. I'm not one of those people who complains that a film had no likable characters. Some of my favorite films are centered on incredibly difficult and alienated individuals. Scorsese's Taxi Driver comes to mind. Much of Taxi Driver's power lies in how it convinces the viewer to sympathize with Travis Bickle, despite his nihilism shading into psychosis. But Bickle's unpleasantness is grounded in his humanity, and his desire for connection. In a way, Bickle simply longs to be like everyone else. Notice the way he gazes upon the American Bandstand dancers as Jackson Brown sings to us of loneliness. But Michael's inability to perceive other people as individuals, and the surrendering disdain with which he treats them, gives way to the opposite feeling: that Michael simply cannot stand others. The film presents us with his potential salvation in Lisa, then snatches it away, too good to be true. In the end Michael goes back to his family, where's he's confronted with a personal hell: a surprise party where he cannot recognize any of his supposed friends. He presents his son with the Japanese sex antique, horrifying his wife when semen seeps from it. The film doesn't resolve so much as simply end, Michael stuck in his mental prison.
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