For
the first time in its 25-year history, the Sundance Film Festival
opened Thursday night with a movie from Australia. It was also the
first time the festival has opened with a feature-length animation —
one, I feel confident in saying, that is among the strangest animated
films ever made. Written and directed by Adam Elliot (who won an Oscar
in 2004 for his 23-minute animated short, Harvie Krumpet), Mary and Max
chronicles the unusual pen-pal relationship between a shy, gloomy
eight-year-old Australian girl from the Melbourne suburbs and an obese,
44-year-old Jewish man living in New York. They meet by chance, when
Mary (voiced at first by newcomer Bethany Whitmore and later by Toni
Collette) rips Max's name out of an international address book at her
local post office and writes him a letter on a whim.
That
begins 20 years of correspondence in which Mary and Max (voiced by
Philip Seymour Hoffman) become each other's best (and effectively only)
friend in the world, despite the paralyzing anxiety the former's
letters strike in the latter (with their uncomfortable questions like,
“Where do babies come from?”), and despite the efforts of Mary's
perpetually plastered, kleptomaniac mother to stop the letters dead in
their tracks. And who can blame her, really? After all, this sort of
relationship between an older man and a pre-pubescent girl just isn't
done, just isn't normal.
Well, as it happens, nothing in Mary and Max
is within even shouting distance of normal. A true outsider's movie,
the closest it comes to a “well-adjusted” or “socially acceptable”
character may be the bully who terrorizes young Mary on the schoolhouse
playground. But the rest of Elliot's claymated ensemble suggest the
love children of Roald Dahl and Todd Solondz — among them Mary's
withdrawn, taxidermy-obsessed father, her legless, agoraphobic neighbor
and the nearly blind atheist woman who regularly cooks Max bowls of
disgusting soup. (And to think, I haven't even mentioned Max's
imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli.) In Elliot's world, even the animals are
outcasts: Mary gives shelter to a rooster that falls of a slaughter
wagon, while Max's pet cat is a one-eyed stray with chronic halitosis.
Max is also the owner of a series of pet goldfish, all named Henry,
each of whom dies a stranger and more grotesque death than the one
before — as for that matter do many of the movie's human characters.
Pixar
this most certainly isn't. In fact, where most feature-length animated
films, by sheer virtue of the painstaking labor involved, aim to reach
the broadest possible audience, Mary and Max — which took over
a year to produce, at an average rate of five seconds of finished
animation per day — is as insular and private as any live-action
“personal filmmaking.” As it happens, Elliot did base the film in part
on his own longtime pen-pal relationship with a New York man diagnosed
(like Max) with Asperger Syndrome, the autism-like disorder that limits
its sufferers' ability to interpret nonverbal communication. But when I
say Mary and Max is a personal film, I mean more in spirit than
in letter. I mean that this is a movie that seems to well up from a
place of such pain and suffering that it's as if Elliot had cut open
some long scabbed-over wound and let it bleed anew all over the screen.
Certain to traumatize children (and even some adults), Mary and Max may be the first “cartoon” that will find its most sympathetic audiences in support groups and mental hospitals.
This
isn't exactly new territory for Elliot, whose films could be considered
the antidote to 98 percent of Hollywood movies and television programs,
with their smiling, airbrushed characters who rarely encounter a
problem that can't be resolved by the end of act three, and who seem
far more plasticine than Elliot's clay avatars. The title character of Harvie Krumpet
was a Touette's-afflicted Polish refugee who gets struck by lightning,
loses a testicle and eventually succumbs to the ravages of Alzheimer's
and suicidal depression. Likewise, Mary and Max spirals towards
suicide (and electroshock therapy), occasionally permitting a ray of
hope to shine down on the characters, only to just as soon dash it with
storm clouds. When the post-graduate Mary authors a book-length study
of Asperger's, a humiliated Max shows his appreciation by ripping the
“M” key from his typewriter and dropping it in the mail. And when Mary
finds what she thinks is love in the form of a handsome classmate, he
turns out to have his own very special, very male pen-pal — with
benefits.
The depressive air weighs heavy, but never quite
overwhelms the film, thanks to Elliot's unfailing ability to find
moments of levity amidst the pervasive despair. In spite of everything
I've said thus far, Mary and Max is a very funny movie that
manages to laugh at its eccentric characters without mocking them,
reducing them to grotesques, or suggesting that they should strive to
“overcome” their “handicaps.” In Elliot's view, to paraphrase the
Firesign Theatre, we're all manic depressives on this bus, and how much
you enjoy the film may well depend on whether you share in that opinion
or simply can't understand why these miserable people don't quit their
whining and get with the program.
When I left the opening-night screening of Mary and Max,
I wasn't entirely sure if Elliot had pulled the thing off, and even 36
hours later, I think the movie errs in the way of many a debut feature
made by directors accustomed to working in the short form. That is, it
runs out of ideas before it runs out of running time. At 60 minutes,
the movie might have been great. At 90, it remains a strikingly
original, uncompromising piece of work. Visually, it is a marvel of
tinsel-and string, hand-crafted design, from the pale, pear-shaped
characters to its vision of New York City as a chiaroscuro urban jungle
in which the only flashes of color are those that arrive in the post
from Down Under. Then there is Hoffman's splendid performance, which
demands an even more dramatic vocal disappearing act than Truman
Capote's adenoidal whine. Max's voice — a raspy, Yiddish-inflected
huff — is so difficult to imagine issuing forth from Hoffman that if
you didn't know it was him you, well, wouldn't know it was him. And
what greater compliment can one pay a character actor than that?
In
the eight years that I've been covering Sundance, this is one of the
only times the opening night film has been less than a calamitous
failure, and maybe the only time it has been a movie of serious
ambition, worth talking, thinking and arguing about afterward. “This
can be a very inspiring time for artists,” Robert Redford opined on the
stage of the Eccles Theatre just prior to the Mary and Max
screening, trying to put some kind of optimistic spin on the current
hard times. That's the sort of programmatic spiel (like last year's
dubious festival mantra, “Focus On Film”) that usually makes hardened
Sundance vets roll their eyes. But after seeing Mary and Max, I can't help thinking that Redford might be on to something.
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