Opening in the Valley today:
Anomalisa—A middle-aged man from L.A.
flies into Cincinnati
for a speaking gig. He’s the author of a popular tome on customer service, and
people murmur his name when he walks into his hotel lobby. He checks into his room,
tips the bellhop, orders some room service, calls an ex-girlfriend who lives in
town. The setting is mundane and his behavior is entirely unremarkable, though
a deep sadness and loneliness suffuses the atmosphere.
All of this, by the way, is depicted in painstakingly
detailed stop-motion animation. For a while, I thought that this was the object
of the cinematic experiment—could stop-motion lend its sense of stylized wonder
even to this sort of naturalistic, slice-of-life drama?
But eventually [spoilers coming, by the way], the tension at
the heart of this strange story becomes clear, as we realize that everybody in
the movie except our hero, Michael, speaks in the same voice. Michael speaks in
the gentle British-accented tones of David Thewlis, but his wife and young son
on the phone, the ex-girlfriend, the cabbie, the desk clerk, people on TV, and everybody
else speaks in the unnerving adult male voice of Tom Noonan.
It’s clear that this is how Michael’s been hearing the world
for a long time, because he springs into action when he suddenly hears an
unfamiliar voice passing in the hall. He tracks it down to a young woman named
Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who’s staying in the hotel. Lisa’s a sweet,
slightly dowdy woman with poor self-esteem. Lisa—who is an anomaly, get it?—and
a girlfriend (with the usual voice) have come from Akron to hear Michael speak, so she’s
starstruck when he begs her to spend time with him.
Written by Charlie Kaufman (based on his own radio play), who
co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, this solipsistic fantasy grows even
more bizarre from there on, in the manner of Kaufman’s earlier pop-absurdist weirdness
like Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York. It’s also sexually graphic,
with results that are both touching and surprisingly erotic.
This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, obviously, but on its
own terms it’s among the strongest and most emotionally charged pictures of the
year. Kaufman takes his time, letting the freaky conceits establish themselves
gradually, and also allowing Michael’s terrible sense of isolation to become
overpowering.
Lisa is the movie’s greatest success. She’s tremendously
likable, and in the face of Michael’s rather predatory neediness, Kaufman,
Johnson and Leigh make us feel urgently protective of her.
The Revenant—Probably because there’s a part of me that still
thinks of him as that little kid from the sitcom, the adult Leonardo DiCaprio
is an ongoing amazement to me. In this adaptation of Michael Punke’s 2002 novel
DiCaprio is entirely credible as Hugh Glass, the frontiersman who, on an
ill-fated pelt-hunting expedition in South
Dakota in 1823, was savaged to the point of death by
a bear, then abandoned by the men charged with staying with him. Horrifically
wounded, he nonetheless dragged himself across hundreds of miles of wilderness,
for the sake of survival and revenge.
This historical incident (it was also the basis for 1971’s
memorable
Man in the Wilderness, with Richard Harris) has been embellished,
giving Glass an even more spaghetti-western-ish motive for his vengeance.
Director Alejandro G. Innaritu stages scene after scene of gruesome and grueling
violence—Indian attacks, the bear mauling, murders, scalpings, disemboweling animals
to sleep in their carcasses—with undeniable primal force.
The final clash between Glass and his chief enemy (Tom
Hardy, who’s superb) is a standard action-movie grapple, and somehow banal. But
on balance,
The Revenant is potent stuff, and vividly acted by DiCaprio, Hardy
and Will Poulter as the young Jim Bridger.
I couldn’t help but notice, however, that Inarittu’s
previous film, the rhapsodically received
Birdman, was about a movie star
prepared to end his own life because his acting career wasn’t going quite as well as
he’d hoped. This time Inarittu gives us a hero who literally crawls out of his
own grave, eats raw meat and cauterizes his own wounds with gunpowder just to
keep breathing. It’s kind of hard to pin down Inarittu’s philosophy.
