{"id":218209,"date":"2025-12-30T14:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T14:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/218209\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T14:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T14:44:09","slug":"charlie-kaufmans-darkest-movie-relaunched-his-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/218209\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Kaufman’s darkest movie relaunched his career"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best joke ever made at the expense of acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman<\/a> arrived smack dab in the middle of a lowpoint in his career. In 2010, Kaufman hadn\u2019t made a new movie since his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York flopped in theaters, and his next film wouldn\u2019t arrive for another five years. So of course, that was when Community creator Dan Harmon decided to drag Kaufman back into the public consciousness for a bit of gentle ribbing.<\/p>\n

In the season 5 episode \u201cMessianic Myths and Ancient Peoples,\u201d Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) hires her community college classmate Abed (Danny Pudi) to make a viral YouTube video about Jesus, but the simple project soon evolves into a tortured meta commentary on the act of filmmaking itself. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn the filmmaker’s film, Jesus is a filmmaker trying to find God with his camera,\u201d Abed explains. \u201cBut then the filmmaker realizes that he’s actually Jesus and he’s being filmed by God’s camera, and it goes like that forever in both directions like a mirror in a mirror, because all of the filmmakers are Jesus and all of their cameras are God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirley replies bluntly: \u201cCome on, Charlie Kaufman, some of us have work in the morning, damn!\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaufman\u2019s name is a clever shortcut for heady, self-referential filmmaking (his films at the time included Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malovitch<\/a>), but it was also clearly done out of love. Because just a few years later, Harmon lifted Kaufman out of his slump with a new film that would prove to be his most simple and powerful yet: Anomalisa.<\/p>\n

Anomalisa was produced by Harmon\u2019s Starburn Industries and released by Paramount on Dec. 30, 2015, but it started out as a play. The story follows Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a middle-aged family man on a business trip to Cincinnati. Michael suffers from the Fregoli delusion, a rare condition where the subject becomes convinced everyone else around them is actually one person wearing various disguises. The Fregoli delusion is often associated with paranoia, but for Michael, it reflects his apathy on life. He drifts through a world without meaning, and the fact that every man, woman, and child has the same face and speaks in the same voice (Tom Noonan) emphasizes how dull that world has become.<\/p>\n

This changes when Michael meets Lisa, an unassuming woman who stands out because she has a unique face and voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh). That night in his hotel room, they get to know each other and eventually have sex, leading to a twist you\u2019ll probably see coming, but I won\u2019t spoil here in case you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\"Anomalisa\"
\n Image:\u00a0Paramount Pictures\/Everett Collection<\/p>\n

As a \u201csound play\u201d with the same actors performing their parts with scripts in hand in front of a live audience, Anomalisa drew humor out of the disconnect between the poignant plot and the reality of those performances. Noonan speaking every other line, for example, is funnier when you can see his actual face, while the hauntingly beautiful sex scene between Michael and Lisa hits different with Thewlis and Leigh grunting and groaning while seated several feet apart from each other onstage. In a 2015 interview with Den of Geek<\/a>, Harmon called Kaufman\u2019s play \u201cthe best thing I\u2019d ever seen written in any written medium, period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adapting that experience to film was a challenge, and one Kaufman initially bristled at. Eventually, he was won over by the idea of reimagining Anomalisa as stop-motion animation featuring lifelike puppets. For the filmmaker, the artform only reinforced the meta-narrative concepts at the heart of all his work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that they\u2019re puppets being manipulated becomes an existential issue as well,\u201d Kaufman told The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cYou know someone\u2019s manipulating them \u2014 they don\u2019t know it.\u201d <\/p>\n

(To lovingly quote a great sitcom, again: \u201cCome on, Charlie Kaufman, some of us have work in the morning, damn!\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"Anomalisa\"
\n Image: Paramount Pictures\/Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Anomalisa earned rave reviews but barely made a profit on its reported $6 million budget \u2014 in the grand scheme of hits like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and even the cult hit Synecdoche, New York, the movie is rarely discussed or remembered outside the few who showed up for it the first time. Kaufman eventually returned to live-action filmmaking with 2020\u2019s I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things<\/a>. As a Netflix original, we have no idea how much it cost or how many people watched it, but I hope Kaufman got a nice paycheck after the painstaking labor of adapting his work to stop-motion.<\/p>\n

Back in 2015, however, Kaufman was clearly still struggling to process the response to Synechdoche, New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been better if it had been a commercial success, because it would have made my professional life afterward easier,\u201d he told The Guardian. \u201cI\u2019ve been writing and struggling to get stuff made since then. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m just sitting here, but it\u2019s been hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopefully, things have gotten a bit easier in the decade since. As the brilliant mind behind some of the most interesting movies of the 21st century, we need more, not less, from Charlie Kaufman \u2014 even if some of his most interesting work came out of a period when he was forced to work with the fewest resources possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The best joke ever made at the expense of acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman arrived smack dab in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-218209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}