Fri, Jan 07, 2011 page16

• Movie review: Mary and Max

  For a film that focuses on the dark side of human existence, ‘Mary and Max’ is surprisingly funny

  • By Ian Bartholomew / Staff Reporter
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  Claymation, the art of using plasticine-like figures and stop motion photography, has a venerable tradition, and in this age of slick CGI effects, it has an old world charm that can be used to good effect. In Mary and Max, Australian director Adam Elliot’s first venture into feature film directing, it proves a powerful expressive medium used to present a modern fable about finding a soul mate in a bleak world where the simplest communication is fraught with danger.

  Mary and Max is about two lonely people. One, Mary, is a dumpy and unattractive child living in suburban Australia with her alcoholic mother and a father who fulfils some inner urge by engaging in taxidermy in the garden shed, and the other is an obese, middle-aged New York Jew with Asperger’s syndrome. It hardly needs to be added that while there is a lot of tenderness and charm to Mary and Max, it is not particularly a film for children.

  Much of the story is told in a voice-over by the narrator, a part performed admirably by comedian Barry Humphries, who in restraining his Dame Edna and Sir Les Patterson personae, proves himself an evocative reader who creates the baseline melody of Elliot’s film. The melody is an adagio, with bursts of antic humor and many stretches of a wry, wistful delight in the absurdity that we can find in the world around us, and also within ourselves.

  

  Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max.

  Photo courtesy of Atom Cinema

  The film is full of clever writing, as befits a story of friendship conducted through the post. There are whimsical throw-away lines as when Max asks Mary: “Do you have a favorite-sounding word? My top-five are ‘ointment,’ ‘bumblebee,’ ‘Vladivostok,’ ‘banana,’ and ‘testicle.’” Read by Philip Seymour Hoffman, this has the cadences of a poem. In describing the tentative beginning of a pen pal friendship between Mary and Max, the narrator describes Max’s feelings: “Max hoped Mary would write again. He’d always wanted a friend. A friend that wasn’t invisible, a pet or rubber figurine.” In the course of the film Max has an imaginary friend, who commits suicide, a succession of fish named Henry that contrive to die in unhappy circumstances, and a collection of plastic cartoon figures from a cartoon show called The Noblets.

  Mary has a birthmark on her forehead “the color of poo.” Her favorite color is brown, and the world around her is rendered in sepia with sudden, almost indecent splashes of color. Max’s world is all shades of gray. Despite this very restricted palette, Elliot manages to give the characters and their surrounds an enormously commanding presence. Mary, voiced as a child by Bethany Whitmore, is lost, ignorant and desperate, but also enormously sympathetic. We feel for her painfully in the off-and-on relationship she has with Max, who finds that her letters, full of questions about were babies come from (“In Australia, they are found at the bottom of beer glasses,” she tells him), about love, and why people bully other people, spark panic attacks that he only gradually learns to control.

  For a film that so resolutely focuses on the dark side of human existence, Mary and Max is surprisingly funny. This ability to laugh through the tears, without diminishing the hurt, is one of the great accomplishments of the film, and keeps it firmly away from becoming sentimental or aspirational. It will also probably keep it firmly out of mainstream cinema.

  

  Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max.

  Photo courtesy of Atom Cinema

  The process of stop-motion claymation is extremely laborious, but it allows Elliot to make each frame into a marvelously evocative picture, something that CGI effects, with their emphasis on real-seeming action, does not encourage.

  Although a small production that in many countries has gone directly to video, Mary and Max has some great voice talent, a creative spark and a sympathetic soul that make its release on the big screen here something to be heartily welcomed.

  For your information

  Mary and Max

  DIRECTED BY: Adam Elliot Voices: Bethany Whitmore/Toni Collette (Mary Daisy Dinkle), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Max Jerry Horovitz), Eric Bana (Damien), Barry Humphries (narrator) RUNNING TIME: 80 MINUTES TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY
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