On the night I saw Adam Elliott’s brilliant Mary & Max, most of the cinemagoers were at the wrong film. Who knows why the censors assigned this dark comedy a PG rating, but this rating attracted a crowd of people looking for Disney-style animation. The woman next to me gorged popcorn, laughed at the sad scenes and reacted not at all to the many razor-sharp comedic moments.
As soon as the film starts, you know this is no lightweight timefiller. Eight-year-old Mary, none too pretty and surviving an alcoholic mother, desperately despatches a letter from the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley to a random New York address. Max, a 44-year-old New York Jew, obese and all alone, responds. The exchange sparks off twenty years of correspondence, sometimes regular, sometimes interrupted for long periods. We discover that Max is an ‘aspie,’ a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome, who endures dark, terrible times when his symptoms clash with regular society. The lives of both Mary and Max come to seem unendurable sequences of despair, lightened only by the joy of their mail friendship.
Adam Elliott’s previous film, Harvie Krumpet, marked him as something special. Using the unbelievably onerous technique of claymation, with clay models moved manually then photographed, frame by tedious frame, Elliott manages to create an alternative world somewhere between regular film and animation. Surprisingly, it’s a quirky world full of raw emotion and meaning. Elliott’s script is timed to perfection. Barry Humphries is outstanding as the constant, ironic narrator, and the other voices (including Philip Seymour Hoffman cast brilliantly as the voice of Max) are first rate. Every scene’s stage is chock full of lovingly crafted pieces of reality and coded messages. Biting humour alternates with raw scenes of existential and physical suffering.
I laughed, I held back tears. In the end, I learned something new about loneliness, courage and friendship. The most outstanding film of 2009, so far, and formed from clay figures!