Mary and Max

Adam Elliot's Oscar winning animated short film, Harvey Krumpet, opened with the following lines:

Some are born great
Some achieve greatness
And some have greatness thrust upon them
And then there are others……

In his new stop motion claymation feature film, Elliot revisits the themes touched on in Krumpet; outsiders grappling with social isolation, dysfunctional families, loneliness, uncertainty, death and yet always, a glimmer of hope in the affirming quality of a connection with someone.

Mary and Max chronicles the 18 years of friendship between 2 unlikely pen-pals; Mary Dinkle, a short chubby and lonely 8 year old girl living in the Australian suburbs and Max Horowitz, a severely obese middle age Jewish man in New York who suffers from Asperger's syndrome and for whom the phrase "full of quirks" does not quite encapsulate the complexity of this character.

Mary and Max click over a love of chocolate, unabashed curiosity with this world and its strange workings and the ability, as with the best kinds of friendship, to express whatever one desires whenever the thought strikes.

This is not a movie with any great revelation or epiphany nor is there the obligatory happy ending where the world realizes how adorable each of these characters are and they walk off into a sunset of smiling faces and social acceptance. Mary and Max both fumble through the act of living and experience their fair share of joys and sadness as with anybody else and at the end of 18 years, remain essentially the same people as at the beginning of the film; people who will never fit properly into mainstream society and are destined for a fair share of loneliness in the walk through life.

Of the 2, Max is a much better realized character whose thoughts and meltdowns, accompanied by the superb voice of Philip Seymour Hoffman, captivates. In comparison, Mary, especially post childhood, never really engages save for one magnificent scene which will likely forever change the song Que Sera Sera for you.



The movie is inspired in part by Elliot's real life pen friend who's an atheist of Jewish descent living in New York and has Asperger's and by Elliot's own childhood growing up in Mount Waverley in Melbourne. As often seems the case with real life inspirations, an objective clarity allows Max the creation to fully bloom while the muddy brown tinged world occupied by Mary often seems undefined and unsettled, perhaps an indication that a critical eye on one's own setting and motivations is often the trickiest form of inspiration to get just right.

A write up of the movie states that it is a film that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity, kleptomania, trust, copulating dogs, sexual and religious differences, agoraphobia and more. A movie that aspires to portray the above all in one continuous 90 minute reel might fall prey to its own idiosyncrasy and certainly parts of it seem gimmicky and calculated for effect. But in its portrayal of life's randomness, the truths contained within linger long after the amusement has faded.

Not clear whether Mary and Max would be widely distributed, which is certainly a pity.

However, you can catch Harvey Krumpet here, make sense of the picture below and celebrate life!