MARY AND MAX

Auckland was bustling tonight as a couple of friends and I ventured out for a film and some geocaches. We walked down several flights of stairs in to the nether regions of the Auckland Central Library to the Academy Cinema. Academy is known for it's art films, marginal and often with cult followings. Tonight, most of the weirdos were on the street level drinking and obviously feeling the affects of the ones that had gone down earlier.

Anyway, here's a review of the film we saw. It has humour but the storyline is far more serious than you might expect. I was with two people who work in mental health. They both laughed and felt the situations more deeply than the average moviegoer.

This review is an excerpt written by Paul Byrnes and taken from The Sydney Morning Herald

MARY AND MAX is sublimely good. Not just good animation, which it certainly is, and not just good because it's Australian (as a lamington). Mary And Max is original, personal, funny and moving; a film of warmth and compassion from a major artist. It could only be done as animation but it transcends that, too, to become a film of great seriousness, unlike most films in that form. It's not for kiddies, either, unless you want to explain what prostitution, condoms and alcoholism are.

Adam Elliot won an Oscar a few years back for his 22-minute film, Harvie Krumpet. He began his rise 12 years ago with a brilliant trilogy of short tragi-comedies - Uncle, Brother and Cousin - the first of which was made while he was still a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Mary And Max has all the brilliance of the early work and a lot more ambition. It's like a Russian short story, shot by Diane Arbus (her photography was one of the inspirations).

Elliot has crossed the creek from short, wry and pungent, where many animators build their houses, to the darker and scarier lands of feature animation. The way is littered with the bones of good animators who failed to heed the dangers. Quirky doesn't work for 90 minutes; charm won't hack it, either. The only thing strong enough is a well-built story, with a solid structure and characters made of oak - or in this case, various polymers, clay, plastic and metal. It has to hold an audience because it's a story, not because it's animated.

Elliot based the film partly on his own life. For 20 years he has corresponded with a New York man who has Asperger's syndrome. In the movie, this is Max Jerry Horovitz, a 44-year-old Jewish man (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who weighs 150 kilograms and lives on chocolate hot dogs. Elliot is now 37 so he must have been about 17 when the pen-pal relationship began. In the movie, his alter ego is a lonely eight-year-old girl, Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced as a child by Bethany Whitmore, later by Toni Collette), which allows Elliot to bring greater innocence to the character.

Mary lives in Lamington Avenue, Mount Waverley, a street full of modest brick houses with the odd Sherrin footy stuck on the roof. It is 1976 and her dad, Noel, works in a factory attaching strings to tea bags; her mother, Vera (voiced by Renee Geyer), lives in a permanent haze caused by sherry and fags. She's a chronic shoplifter in ribald red lipstick and Edna Everage glasses. When the garbos come crashing through the dawn, Vera staggers out to catch them. "You got room for one more bag?" she shouts. "Sure Mrs Dinkle, hop in," says the garbo.

Mary is short and myopic. The narrator (Barry Humphries) tells us with little mercy that she has eyes the colour of muddy puddles and a birthmark on her forehead "the colour of poo". No one is kind to her since her grandpa died a year earlier, after drinking ammonia. At school, one of her classmates pees in her lunch box. She retreats to her bedroom to ponder life's many questions, such as where babies come from. She has been told that in Australia, they come from beer glasses. She decides to write to someone in New York for a comparison. The name she picks at random from a phone book is that of Max Horovitz.
From the sunny, sepia-coloured streets of Mount Waverley, the design changes to a scarier monochrome for Manhattan. Max waddles through mean streets to a tiny, shabby apartment in a scummy building. His sad eyes pop out of his odd-shaped head like a frog's and he's even lonelier than Mary. He's fat, ugly and friendless, with no one except the ancient neighbour Ivy and a goldfish called Henry the Eighth (the first seven died). Max is so nervous that he has an anxiety attack when he reads Mary's first letter. After he recovers, he replies to her inquiries with candour and chocolate and so begins a beautiful friendship.

Elliot's imagination is childlike and impish, hence all the jokes about bodily functions, but it's matched by a keen intelligence and sense of compassion. Everyone in the film is damaged; a few are suicidal and don't make it, so there's a sense of life's traumas. Max is a heartbreaking character, a gentle spirit trapped in an unkind body and ruled by an unquiet mind. His loneliness is terrifying. And yet, this is a love story, too, because Mary is capable of making him feel friendship through her letters. It's a story that might not be expected to work but it does because Elliot in turn loves his characters and their worlds. He has learned how to tell big stories in miniature settings. The quality of the animation here is outstanding; the quality of the filmmaking is even better.