Review: Mary and Max (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                            MARY AND MAX
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Witty animation tells this story in just
     about the only way it could be told pleasantly.
     A lonely Melbourne eight-year-old picks a random
     name from a New York City phonebook and begins what
     will become a correspondence of many years.  At the
     other end is a New York City man suffering from
     Asperger's syndrome.  From opposite ends of the world
     the two can say anything to each other, and the clay
     animation lets us see what their minds' eyes are
     seeing.  The story is wise and funny in ways it could
     not be in live action.  Oscar-winner Adam Elliot
     directs while almost unrecognizably Toni Collette and
     Philip Seymour Hoffman voice the two main roles.
     Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

This could be the golden age of animated films, but nearly always
the films are have frothy, silly themes.  Hamburgers fall from the
sky or balloons pull a house up into it.  Very rarely does a
director with a serious theme use animation and give us a GRAVE OF
THE FIREFLIES or a WALTZ WITH BASHIR.  Adam Elliot, who won the
Best Short Animated Film Oscar in 2003 for "Harvie Krumpet" gives
us the bittersweet epistolary relationship between Mary Daisy
Dinkle and Max Jerry Horovitz.  And it is all rendered in clay.
Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a child, Toni Collette as an
adult) is at the beginning an eight-year-old living a lower-class
life in a suburb of Melbourne in 1976.  Her mother seems to live
on nipping sherry and stealing from the grocers.  With a silly
question about where babies come from she picks a random name, Max
Jerry Horovitz, from a New York telephone book and writes to Max
to find where babies come from in the United States.  Max is, it
turns out, a morbidly obese New York Jewish man who suffers from
Asperger's syndrome.  The unlikely couple forms a relationship
that lasts for two decades.  Each has bizarre viewpoints on the
real world and the way the world is, and Elliot renders their
minds' eye visions in animation.  Their relationship is by turns
comical and painful.

We look at Max's lonely life ruled by frequently pointless order.
He is almost devoid of human companionship and happy to strike up
a friendship with this young Australian.  Director Elliot uses a
style of a black-and-while world with just one or two objects in
the picture in color.  Mary gets to live in a color world, but one
that is not very pleasant.  The film does not clean up the rough
edges of life; it glories in them.  And Max's life is almost all
rough edges.  But by keeping the telling simple, as it is in the
letters, we are not dragged into the tragedy with full impact of
Max's or Mary's situations.  With time Mary is able to transcend
her environment and even turn what she learned from her
relationship with Max into her career.  Max never has that
strength and the real tragedy is his.

This is not the sort of 3-D animated film we have seen of late.
The Claymation is perfect, but it always allows us to feel for the
characters, never to minimize them.  They never get into fights or
have to race anywhere.  These are simple characters rendered more
likable by the comic distortion of the clay artwork.  There is
little real plot to this film but the characters are foremost.

While the film tells us that it is based on a true story--and it
is a story that Adam Elliot should know well--there was no Mary.
The film is based on Elliot's own correspondence with an
Asberger's sufferer in the United States.  Elliot is telling his
own story with wit and charm.

This original film took five years to make.  There is a lot of
wisdom to it and it covers a great deal in a deceptively simple-
seeming package.  I rate MARY AND MAX a low +2 on the -4 to +4
scale or 7/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0978762/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10010721-mary_and_max/>



					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper