Mary and Max (2009)

Mary and Max is an independent claymation flick from Australia, with a darkly comic theme about a lonely and misunderstood 8-year-old girl who strikes up an unlikely and disturbing correspondence and friendship with a 48-year-old overweight depressive male diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. While that sounds unlikely enough as a topic for an animated film, what was truly unexpected was the moving power of its simple message, achieved without resorting to sentimentalism or cliche.

The film, apparently based on a true story, plays like Wallace and Gromit conceived by Oliver Sacks and imagined by David Lynch and Robert Crumb. The animated characters, who tend to be overweight with exaggerated melancholy expressions, are nevertheless enormously expressive and the film seamlessly shifts from the muted colors of the rundown Australian suburb where Mary lives to the expressive black and white of Max's New York City.

Mary (Toni Collette) is a curious and lonely girl, whose father is unavailable and whose mother is an alcoholic kleptomaniac and whose neighbors are each in their own way inscrutable. Confronted by questions the adults around her are unwilling to answer, she selects Max's name at random from an American phonebook and writes an inquisitive letter to a complete stranger. Initially thrown for a loop by this unexpected query, Max detects a kindred spirit and responds to her letter with complete sincerity. So begins a peculiar correspondence, fraught throughout with misunderstanding but culminating in a lifelong friendship that is able to carry them both through a great deal of personal misfortune and tragedy.

The voice of Phillip Seymour Hoffman invests the character of Max with a deeply sincere confusion about the peculiar games that people play. A card carrying communist and atheist, he nevertheless wears the skullcap he wore as a child, when his mother taught him babies came from egg-laying rabbis. He is honest to a fault, incapable of saying the kinds of things people like to hear; his imaginary friend, a psychiatrist by the name of Mr. Ravioli, stopped speaking to him after his real psychiatrist convinced him he was no longer necessary.

Mary and Max was dark and tender and strange and disconcerting and lovely. Its simple theme, conveyed lightly and through dark circumstance, is captured in a concluding quotation by Ethel Mumford: "God gave us relatives. Thank God we can choose our friends."

One thing animation does very well is give us great art. But what it rarely does is actually create realistic human characters with all their inconvenient imperfections. This movie does both...and I consider "Mary and Max" one of the most daring films of 2009.

Those familiar with the animator Adam Elliot may recall he won an Oscar for "Harvie Krumpet" in the category of

short animated films. This film is his major oevre, an expanded version of the shorter film, albeit with different characters.

Ostensibly, the story is about a friendship between two unlikely partners. Max is an overweight, depressed, New York Jew suffering from serious mental illness. Mary is 8 years old, chubby, and confused. Both are lonely and underappreciated...and through the chance occurrence of a letter from Mary to Max, they develop a deep and real

friendship as pen pals.

Now, in many respects, both characters are very flawed human beings. And that is what makes the film remarkable. So many animated films from Finding Nemo to Beauty and the Beast end with a successful quest of the hero and heroine. This storyline is far more subtle. Both Mary and Max battle the everyday troubles of modern life finding a way to fit in a world when they don't fit in at all. Searching for an influence on this movie in the history of cinema, I might select the Oscar best picture "Marty" which filmed a love affair between two ordinary people in the 1950's.

I cannot finish the review without saying something about the extraordinary recreation of New York City in ClayMation. I rather liked the fact the film uses claymation for the characters because it renders them far more "earthy" than the bright, digital CGI formula so popular today.

This is a film with dark moments and tender moments and annoying moments...in sum a film about life as it is really lived.

Buy Mary and Max (2009) Now

From Academy Award-winning Australian director Adam Elliot, maker of the wonderfully weird and demented Harvie Krumpet (Best Animated Short, 2004 -you can see it on YouTube), comes another equally weird and demented new animation called "Mary and Max". His work is not very well known in the US, but it's fantastic and should be more widely seen by fans of animation and dark, morbid humor.

It is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between a chubby, homely, and socially maladjusted 8 year old girl in Melbourne, Australia named Mary Daisy Dinkle and a severely overweight and neurotic middle-aged Russian-Jewish man in New York with Asperger syndrome, named Max Jerry Horowitz. Mary has no friends and is taken care of by her alcoholic and kleptomaniac mother. On a chance visit to the post office, she finds an American phonebook and decides to write to someone to ask where babies come from while her mother tries to steal boxes of envelopes. The name she randomly chose was Max's, whom she sends a letter and a candy bar. They share a love for chocolate, a Smurfs-like show called The Noblets, and a need for friendship. In each other, they find kindred spirits and what follows is two decades of humorous correspondence and weird gift exchanges.

Voiced by an almost unrecognizable Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he plays the part of Max perfectly. There are no words to convey the frequency and weirdness of the deadpan humor. You'll just have to watch it. Literally every minute or two is filled with some weird joke, dialog, or visual gag. Owing to Max's autism, there's a lot of random humor and non sequiturs. This is probably the only animation where you'll see a "feline rectal thermometer" or learn that "turtles can breathe through their anuses" (which is actually true).

The film is wonderfully stylish and richly detailed. The film takes place between the 1970's and 1990's and is full of nostalgic images from that time, with some very nice modeling of a grimy New York City. Visually, everything in Mary's world is monochromatic brown, and everything in Max's is black and white, punctuated by spots of color like in Sin City. It deals with loneliness, depression, atheism, and above all, friendship.

Lastly, I need to mention that this is DEFINITELY not one for the kids, if you are expecting wholesome family entertainment like Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]. The film is filled with abundant adult-themed humor, numerous sexual references, as well as instances of cartoony nudity. It is dialog driven and likely to bore them anyway. Well worth seeing if you like dark and quirky humor.

Read Best Reviews of Mary and Max (2009) Here

Bored, nothing on TV, watched all of the Jericho episodes ever made, what to watch now? Thankfully NetFlicks had updated their movie selection, and I saw Mary & Max on the list. I had no preconceptions about the film, just a mild curiosity.

The smooth narration drew me into a story the likes of which I have never heard before. The plot is summarized already, though I'd like to point out that there are inconsistencies in the summary, but nothing too bad. I'd like to tell you how the movie made me feel.

First, it was hilarious. There was a gentle observational humor that was even more poignant because the observers are so different from the average person. The very serious topic of mental differences** was handled with delicacy, never overwhelming the viewer with pity for the subject, Max, while at the same time instilling an appreciation of how others can see life differently without being wrong. I loved how Max was often presented as being the sanest person in a city of "normal" people.

Despite what the summary says about Max's counterpart, Mary, was not a "goth". She was a lonely little girl whose physical differences, rather than mental ones, separated her from the rest of society. In Max she found a compatriot; they enjoyed the same cartoons, they had both endured teasing as children, and both were baffled by human emotions and what to do with them.

Though the story takes a dark turn, the ending brings redemption and bittersweet closure to a tale that I recommend to everyone.

** Mary & Max made me want to strike "mental illness/handicap/disability" from my vocabulary. So I am.

Want Mary and Max (2009) Discount?

It is beyond me why this title is so obscure. None of the stores in my town are carrying it, and here on Amazon it has only 8 reviews. But it is the best animated feature I have seen in years. In fact, I cannot think of a better one. It is elaborate and beautiful as a Tim Burton film, but has more subtlety and more heart. I think that the big media companies don't know what to do with a film like this. It isn't really appropriate for children. It is too intelligent for the average American who is more accustomed to the shallow and flashy garbage which tv and Hollywood have innundated us with. It is too bleak and dark for a culture which insists that its darkness be leavened with positive messages and happy endings. (It does, in fact, have such a message but rather overwhelmed by all the mental illness, alienation and death.) This film does, however, have an audience and when they stumble across it they will treasure it, and this film won't be forgotten. I wouldn't be surprised, in 10 years, to see a company like Kino or Criterion releasing it, to great acclaim, as an obscure classic.

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