Charlie Kaufman delivers another insightful rumination on love with this beautiful, one-of-a-kind romance that won the Venice Grand Jury Prize and is nominated for the Best Animation Feature Golden Globe.
Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a successful motivational speaker with fans across the country, but inside him sits a knot of anxiety that renders much of his daily life meaningless. Everything and everyone just seems the same to him. But then Michael meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) on a speaking-tour stop in Cincinnati. Lisa is an anomaly.
Michael and Lisa begin with prickly, cautious conversations and then move towards love. But, unlike in a conventional Hollywood romance, that romantic arc is neither simple nor obvious. The love scene at the heart of Anomalisa should instantly rocket up the list of cinema’s greatest. It’s intimate, awkward, heartbreaking and deeply erotic despite the fact that the lovers are made of felt.
Returning to the themes of human connection and artistic creation that ran through his feature directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, as well as his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman delivers an even more insightful rumination on love here, one that finds its perfect expression in the fragility of the film team’s stop-motion figures.
Anomalisa opens in cinemas nationwide on 11 March. http://www.Anomalisa.co.uk