FILM: Review - Mary and Max

We at The Spectator Arts Blog are great admirers of the ‘clayographies’ of the Oscar-winning Australian short filmmaker Adam Elliot  and so we were particularly pleased when Emma Simmonds, a staff writer for The Big Picture and PopMatters, attended a recent screening of Eliot’s first feature and reported that it is rather wonderful. – Scott Jordan Harris

Mary & Max wears its big, soft heart on its grubby, crumpled sleeve. It celebrates life’s losers, mining tragedy for comedy and creating a sweet yet cynical claymation that charts the tribulations of two unlikely friends. It tells the story of pen-friends Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore / Toni Collette), a podgy eight-year-old Australian girl with a chaotic home-life, and Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle-aged New Yorker who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome.
 
These disparate personalities are brought together when the Melbournite Mary picks Max’s name out of a NY phone directory and writes him an introductory letter. Max is initially disconcerted by this unanticipated, inky intrusion into his carefully-ordered and solitary existence but, after an 18-hour spell of consideration, he hammers out an enthusiastic response on his battered typewriter. This is the beginning of a 20-year correspondence.
 
Based on elements of its writer-director’s childhood – and in particular his relationship with his own New York-based, ‘Aspie’ pen-pal – this deeply personal, heartfelt picture sees Elliot’s style of animation, and interest in ‘difference’, triumphantly extended to feature length following his hugely promising, award-magnet short film Harvie Krumpet. (This is, in fact, his fourth ‘clayography’; the others are the trilogy of short films: Uncle, Cousin, and Brother.) With the flaws of both Mary and Max – his doughy, dysfunctional duo – writ unavoidably large, he further challenges our preconceptions and prejudices.
 
Mary & Max draws a visual distinction between the pair’s home environments, giving us a monochrome metropolis and salt-of-the-earth suburbia. The dynamic and differing aesthetics incorporate symbolic flashes of spot red (hardly an original technique but effectively employed) to represent the colour Mary brings into Max’s life. Despite the gulf in their years and geographical distance, they each live a lonely, often ignominious existence. These characters may be animated in one sense of the word, but they are mired in life’s myriad cruel realities.
 
Mary’s ‘wobbly’ mother, Vera Lorraine Dinkle (Renée Geyer), is a kleptomaniac with a penchant for sherry (‘tea for grownups’). Mary is teased at school because of her ‘poo’ coloured facial birthmark and takes comfort in the minutiae of her life, her homemade toys, her rooster Ethel and in overindulging in cans of sweetened, condensed milk. Max is an obese former mental patient, the owner of various pets, including a parakeet called Mr Biscuit, eight identical tracksuits and is a man for whom ‘love is as foreign as scuba diving’. The supporting cast includes the vocal talents of Eric Bana (Chopper, Troy) as Mary’s neighbour Damian Cyril Popodopoulous, who Mary describes as having the fragrance of lemon dishwashing liquid and skin ‘smoother than the back of a spoon’.
 
With its familiar, yet appropriately stirring, soundtrack and cast of recognisable, affectionate grotesques, the film is touching and earnest, positively radiating affection for the peculiar pair. There is something endearingly painstaking and unashamedly archaic about the clayography / stop-motion method of animation, and Mary & Max expertly mines every drop of goodwill the cherished medium attracts. The characters are charmingly imperfect, both credible characterisations and flawed creations of this (our) world.
 
The choice of medium allows idiosyncrasy into every millimetre of the mise-en-scene. To give a sense of the labour involved, the shoot ran to a full 57 weeks and 212 puppets – each with fully articulated ball and socket armatures – were created for the film from polymers, clays, plastics and metals. 133 separate sets were constructed and 475 miniature props made, including tiny hand-blown wine glasses and a fully-functioning typewriter (which took one prop maker nine weeks to design and build).
 
The skilful juxtaposition of humour and pathos delivers both killer laughs and knockout emotional punches. The film is gently but absorbingly paced and bolstered considerably by the dulcet, winningly comic tones of its avuncular narrator, Barry Humphries, who has most of the dialogue. Mary & Max is a low-key triumph: a wonky gem, made with love, which thoroughly deserves to be widely seen.

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