→ July 16, 2016
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Anomalisa.

Anomalisa is the best depiction of depression that I’ve come across in any medium of fiction, even though it’s, of all things, made with puppets and stop-motion animation. It uses one incredibly effective gimmick to show us the main character’s illness without resorting to lengthy explanations, and then is carried forward by the three voice actors’ performances in a story that is at times heartbreaking yet often deliberately silly. (It’s also available on iTunes.)

Michael Stone, voiced by David Thewlis (a.k.a., Remus Lupin), is a successful author and public speaker on the topic of customer service, and he’s just landed in Cincinnati to give a talk on the topic. He’s also battling what we learn is a very longstanding case of depression, which is shown to us via his senses: He sees all other people as having the same face, and all their voices as identical as well. Male, female, child, adult, whatever, they all look and sound alike to him. (All of these characters are voiced by character actor Tom Noonan, who just moderates his pitch slightly for age and gender, nothing more.) Many of the people he meets are comically annoying, from the cab driver who gets him to the hotel to the bellman who just won’t leave, followed by a disastrous reunion with the girlfriend he left without explanation ten years earlier.

Later that night, he hears a different voice for the first time in years, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a very insecure woman who drove in from out of town with her friend just to hear Michael’s talk. Michael pursues her, discovering that she’s lonely in her own way, and … things move from there, but I wouldn’t say they “progress,” so much as they stumble, because Michael is still depressed and Lisa – whom he dubs “Anomalisa” when she refers to herself as a sort of anomaly – is not the cure.

I have been there, so to speak, not for the length of time that Michael has apparently been depressed but for long enough stretches to recognize what he’s enduring, and I’ve described it as a sort of fog. Colors seem less bright, everything is darker, edges are less crisp, and memories are always less clear. You don’t even necessarily know what’s wrong until you’re out of it and realize that your perception of the world and everyone in it was warped by your condition. I never suffered from the sort of modified Fregoli delusion that writer Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich) gives Michael, but it works perfectly as a metaphor for depression in general. Your brain perceives the world without its details, so everything becomes less interesting or able to hold your attention, and you become overwhelmed with a feeling of sameness. (I assume the name Anomalisa also alludes to anomie, a sociological term that can refer to the loss of direction or purpose an individual might feel due to a sense of alienation or disconnect from society. Michael also stays at the Hotel Fregoli for another bit of Kaufman wordplay.)

Anomalisa also avoids showing depression as a one-dimensional disorder. Michael is depressed, but he can still function. He got on the plane. He’s given these speeches before and even written a best-selling book. He has fans. He’s supposed to be quite good-looking (for a puppet). Depressed is not dead. You can be depressed, or anxious, or even bipolar, and still lead a functional life – just not a fulfilled one. And for whatever reason, Zoloft, a very widely prescribed anti-depressant, doesn’t appear to have helped Michael. His foggy status could be a combination of the depression and the side effect of SSRIs that they tend to take the edges off your emotions, for better or for worse; at one point he mentions being unable to cry, something I’ve experienced on escitalopram (Lexapro) as well.

The film’s concluding sequence is somewhat jarring after the languorous pace of everything up to and including Michael’s encounter with Lisa, although it’s a logical series of events – it’s simply missing a few pieces, notably a last conversation between those two before Michael returns to Los Angeles, his miserable wife, and attention-starved son. Kaufman’s better at beginnings than endings; Being John Malkovich is a brilliant idea that crashes into the wall on the final lap, although I thought Eternal Sunshine ended well by returning to the beginning. Here, his script finishes with one final, beautiful flourish, a glimmer of hope in Lisa’s words and a visual trick you might miss if you’re not looking for it, that salvaged the slightly incongruous editing at the end.

If you’ve ever struggled to understand depression, perhaps because a friend or loved one has it, watch Anomalisa. All three voice actors are superb, especially Leigh, whose intonation reveals her character’s insecurity long before we understand her reasons for it. Kaufman’s script gives the disease an authentic, uncomfortable (quite so, at times) treatment for the serious, multi-dimensional story mental illness deserves. It’s a sad film, but never humorless, and left me wanting to see more.

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→ July 11, 2016
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Ex Machina.

My thoughts on prospects in the 2016 Futures Game are up for Insiders.

Ex Machina is a quiet mindbender of a film featuring a smart script that explores questions of consciousness, free will, and the power of the machine without becoming hyperbolic or paranoid. It made a number of critical best-of-2015 lists but was largely shut out of the major Academy Awards, although one of its stars, Alicia Vikander, won Best Supporting Actress for her part in The Danish Girl and could easily have earned a nomination for this as well. (Is there a rule precluding one actor from earning two nominations in the same category in the same year for different films?) The movie features three outstanding performances and some otherworldly CG graphics that somehow never manage to overwhelm the rest of the film. The movie is free for Amazon Prime members and also available on iTunes.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendan “Mad-Eye Moody” Gleeson) is a young coder at a hugely successful search engine company called Blue Book, named for the journals of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and wins a contest to spend a week at the remote house of the company’s founder, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Nathan has been working on developing a robot with an AI good enough to pass the Turing test and has chosen Caleb to partake in the test as its human half. Caleb meets the robot, named Ava, who has a human face and shape but otherwise looks like a robot in a humanoid case. She can understand nuances in speech and read microexpressions, and early on it appears that she’s going to pass Caleb’s version of the test, although in an actual Turing test the human subject would be unaware whether he’s talking to a computer or a person. Eventually Ava, whom Nathan has confined to her little apartment within his compound, expresses her desire to escape, and Caleb agrees to help her.

The unfolding of this simple plot provides the film with strong narrative greed – I had a guess at what would happen and was only about half right – is largely secondary to the issues the script is trying to explore, even though it can’t answer any of them in full and doesn’t seem to try to do so. Is Ava alive? Is not, what is she, since she has consciousness, self-awareness, and what certainly appear to be emotions? Does she have free will if her cognitive processes are the results of code, not biology? Is it ethical to keep her confined as Nathan does – or unethical to let her out? Once Caleb has learned more details about Nathan’s experiment, then does he have any obligations in the matter?

One thing Ex Machina doesn’t do is delve into excessive paranoia about the machines taking us over. There’s a cautionary note inherent in the story, because it’s clear that Nathan’s robots would be indistuinguishable from people on sight, but director and writer Alex Garland, whose script got the film’s only non-technical Oscar nomination, lets the story create that concern in the mind of the viewer rather than laying it on thickly with the AI going bananas on screen.

The performances drive this film more than anything else. Vikander is superb in every way, communicating this perfect childlike innocence that provides a stark, useful contrast to her character’s intelligence. She’s beautiful, as the AI has to be for the plot to work properly, but in specific ways (especially her eyes) that accentuate her character’s otherness rather than making her strictly a fembot.

There are plenty of little flourishes that enhance the film overall without taking away from the main storyline. If you’ve seen it, you know how incredible the dance scene is – and how much the movie benefited from that one real moment of levity. Wittgenstein wrote about the mind-body problem of philosophy and his writings were forerunners to the school of functionalism, which defines states of mind by their purpose rather than the feelings that they comprise, so his work would clearly inform debates over what Ava actually is. “Enola Gay,” the OMD classic about the bombing of Hiroshima – another history-altering use of technology – plays early in the film while Caleb is first getting ready in his suite within Nathan’s house. (“Is mother proud of Little Boy today?” might have the genders flipped, but otherwise appears to apply to Nathan and Ava.) The code Caleb writes when he’s hacking into Nathan’s house security contains a great Easter egg (and that isn’t the only one in that scene). The score as a whole is superb, right down to the use of Savages’ “Husbands” over the closing credits. If I have one quibble, it’s with Caleb’s choice of how to check whether he is in fact a human – a plot twist I was wondering about, which would have made the film almost too much of a Philip K. Dick knockoff – doing so in a way that would likely have killed an actual person.

Then there’s the ending, which might be the only hiccup in the plot as a whole, but to be honest I don’t see how else the film could have ended given what came before. It’s not the comfortable ending you might have wanted, but Garland led the film to this point, and if it’s a little too pat, at least it’s not clean.

I don’t normally do a “next up” for films but I’ve already rented Anomalisa so I know that’ll be the next movie I watch.

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→ March 2, 2016
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Spotlight.

I’m not a big movie guy in general, and the Academy’s leanings the last few years in Best Picture nods haven’t done a lot to bring me back to the fold – not that they’re choosing bad movies, but that they’ve favored a lot of movies I wouldn’t even want to watch. (I’m sure 12 Years a Slave was amazing. I just can’t watch that kind of cruelty.) I did watch Birdman, last year’s winner, and thought it was clever but lacked any sort of resolution to the main story, as if the screenwriter had a great idea for a movie script but couldn’t figure out how to finish it.

Spotlight (amazon • iTunes), which of course won Best Picture earlier this week, appealed to me more than any recent winner I can think of. The story shows how a small group of reporters at the Boston Globe known as the Spotlight team conducted a months-long investigative effort that uncovered the scope of the abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, including the fact that the Archbishop of the Boston diocese, Cardinal Bernard Law (no relation), knew about it and did nothing beyond moving the pedophile priests around to new parishes. It’s a film that’s going to be talky – big on dialogue, light on action, highly dependent on everything from acting to directing to editing to make it a compelling film. The whole concept of a dramatic film that has no action, no sex, no romance, not even a proper antagonist (in the conventional sense of a ‘villain’), feels very British to me, just because their TV programs and films tend to be more story-driven in my entirely anecdotal experience.

Spotlight is an incredible film in the most old-fashioned sense: It tells a great story and never lets up until the end. The pacing was perfect, the performances were very strong, and no nonsensical subplots interfered with the unfolding of the main story. Only one scene rang a little false, one that felt like it was inserted so that there was a Big Dramatic Conflict to use on awards shows, but otherwise the screenplay was taut and efficient, wasting few words and even less time on irrelevant details.

I thought the performances were almost all excellent, yet none seemed likely to win an award – I was surprised to see the nominations the cast received, because these performances were all so understated. Liev Schreiber plays the new editor of the Globe, perceived as an interloper because he’s not from Boston and because he’s Jewish, with such restraint that it was hard to remember who was behind the glasses and facial hair. Mark Ruffalo, playing reporter Mike Rezendes, was just as unrecognizable with a little change to his hairstyle, a slight accent, and, aside from the one scene where he blows up at Keaton’s character, delivers a similarly spartan portrayal. A mediocre writer could have had him explode at the imperious file clerk who won’t give him access to public records that would prove damning to the Church, and a mediocre actor would have hammed it up, but instead, we get a scene that works because it’s so mundane.

The lesson of Spotlight the movie – as distinct from the scandal, which certainly gets its air time in the film but doesn’t need me to thinkpiece it any further – is that the drama in a good dramatic film doesn’t have to come from the screenplay. This story was inherently compelling: A small team of reporters, given unusual autonomy, discovers and reveals a massive, decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by one of the world’s most powerful and most implicitly trusted authorities through hard work and ingenuity. I could give you a dozen places where someone could have Hollywoodized the script – a screaming confrontation between reporters and church officials would be the most obvious – but instead we get a simple, linear story, where the narrative greed comes from the piecemeal uncovering of the scandal. Even my short attention span was riveted for two solid hours, and when the story was over, the film is over, and if that last scene wasn’t real, well, I am going to pretend that that’s what actually happened the day the story finally ran.

The defunct Phoenix also did some great work on the story and does get a brief mention in the film, although there’s a debate over how much credit they deserve. The Globe certainly pushed the story much farther.

I’m going to watch a few of last year’s highly-rated films now that many of them are available digitally (legally – I won’t Torrent), so if you’ve got a favorite or two, nominated or otherwise, throw them in the comments. I will watch movies in any language, but I draw the line at Room, which I think I will find far too upsetting because I have a young daughter.

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