The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Greta Gerwig, AJ Bowen, Dee Wallace. Screenplay: Ti West. Cinematography: Elliot Rockett. Production design: Jade Healy. Film editing: Ti West. Music: Jeff Grace. 

I’ve said it before: I’m not particularly interested in or scared by horror movies. But as an amateur film historian, I feel compelled every October to sample the horror classics and newer movies provided in anticipation of Halloween by movie channels and streaming services, even the high-toned ones like the Criterion Channel. The trouble sometimes is that I’m not in on the jokes provided by the horrormeisters, who love to reference older films in the genre. Several things should have clued me in, starting with the oddly flat-footed title, that The House of the Devil was going to be something of an hommage to earlier films, particularly the opening screen that referred to the wave of “satanic cults” that made news in the 1980s. The deliberately retro look of the opening credits themselves should have alerted me, and when Greta Gerwig showed up with Farrah Fawcett hair I did begin to suspect something was up. Since I didn’t watch horror movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I’m not the right audience for Ti West’s throwback movie. So all I can say is that it’s a well-done tribute to the kind of movies I should have been watching in order to be the right kind of audience. It’s nicely paced, if a little slow in spots, setting up the menace lurking in the old dark house, and showing us that Samantha, well acted by Jocelin Donahue, is spunky and resourceful up to a point – that point being her willingness to go upstairs, something nobody in a horror movie should ever do. And the cataclysmic burst of action at the film’s climax is as satisfying as it should be. I even appreciated the coda, with its evocation of a true classic that transcends the genre, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But I have to leave it to horror aficionados to explicate all the references by writer-director-editor Ti West to the period he’s honoring, which makes The House of the Devil just a bit of a miss for me.

 

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest. Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Robert Frazen. Music: Jon Brion.

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015)

Michael Stone: David Thewlis
Lisa Helleman: Jennifer Jason Leigh
Everybody Else: Tom Noonan

Director: Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Based on a play by Charlie Kaufman (as Francis Fregoli)
Cinematography: Joe Passarelli
Production design: John Joyce, Huy Vu
Music: Carter Burwell

Of all forms of animation, stop-motion has for me the greatest creep factor, which Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay, and Duke Johnson, who supervised the animation, deliberately play on in Anomalisa. Traditional cel animation works with the charm of seeing hand-drawn pictures come to life, and computer animation has overcome the gee-whiz element of technological innovation to bring about a simulacrum of real life. But to my mind, only Nick Park and the geniuses at Aardman have managed to overcome the flickery stiffness of stop-motion, and that mainly by telling genuinely funny stories. Anomalisa succeeds too, but it isn't funny -- except in parts. It begins with Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), an expert in the manipulative field of "customer service," arriving in Cincinnati to deliver an address to a convention. Soon we begin to notice something odd: All of the people he meets, male and female, sound the same. They all speak with the voice of Tom Noonan, with only a few variations of accent and pitch to distinguish them from one another. So it's a shock when we -- and Stone -- hear a female voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh's) outside his hotel room. Stone immediately pursues the voice and finds its owner, Lisa Hesselman, who is bowled over to be meeting the Michael Stone, famous in customer-service circles for his book on the topic. Stone invites Lisa and her roommate for a drink, then rather rudely throws over the roommate and asks Lisa back to his room. Kaufman's creation of shy, awkward Lisa, who is deeply self-conscious because of a facial scar that she hides with her hair and who talks constantly and nervously, is a masterstroke. (Anomalisa was originally a play in which Thewlis and Leigh sat on opposite sides of the stage with Noonan in the middle.) Stone calls Lisa an anomaly, a word that he morphs into "anomalisa," and after persuading her to sing Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," they have sex. (The film is rated R and there is full-frontal male puppet nudity.) But the next morning, after a beautifully staged nightmare sequence that plays on Stone's guilt and paranoia, he finds his infatuation with Lisa beginning to fade: When she speaks, he begins to hear Noonan's voice echoing everything she says. He has a breakdown during his convention address, and returns home to his family, now uncertain about his sanity. It's a devastating tale, based in part on a neuropsychological phenomenon known as the Fregoli delusion -- the hotel Stone stays in is called the Fregoli, which is also the pseudonym Kaufman used on the play -- but more largely on the universal conundrum of personal identity. It gets into your head and stays there like an unsettling dream.