Mountain FogMARY AND MAX: ADAM ELLIOT'S LABOUR OF LOVE
April 9th 2009 06:45
Philip Seymour Hoffman lends a brilliant take on his vocal cords as Max in 'Mary and Max.'
Claymation is an increasingly aberrational art form in 21st century cinema. Pixar-led computer magic is now de rigueur when it comes to animation and anybody who wants to crouch over clay sets managing to squeeze out five seconds of footage a day would seem on a fool’s errand. Besides Aardman Animation, the only modern filmmaker to engage in the process with any high-profile success is Australian Adam Elliot. Elliot won an Oscar for his claymation short, Harvie Krumpet in 2003 and only now returns with his first feature length effort, Mary and Max.
It's 1976 when we meet Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced first by Bethany Whitmore and later, as an adult, by Toni Collette), a plump, lonely, chocolate-loving 8-year-old girl living in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley, where she's neglected by her dull factory-worker dad and sherry-testing, shoplifting mother. Mary leads a terribly lonely existence, and longing for a friend besides her pet rooster, she tears a page at random from an American phone book and ends up scrawling a letter to Max Jerry Horowitz (voiced with beautiful intonation and timing by Philip Seymour Hoffman), a 44 year-old, overweight and Asperger-suffering Jewish man who lives alone in his Manhattan apartment. While it would seem the two have very little in common, it turns out that Max shares Mary's passion for chocolate and a kids' cartoon on TV called The Noblets. The correspondence that ensues ends up lasting for 20 years, as the two become firm pen pals, discussing things such as taxidermy, alcoholism, the mysteries of conception and any other peculiar topic that comes streaming out of their minds and on to paper.
While claymation is exceptionally demanding in terms of production, Adam Elliot hasn’t made things any easier for himself with the story he’s scripted for Mary and Max. A tale of two pen pals corresponding over twenty years doesn’t automatically qualify as great visual entertainment. Elliot, to his credit, has done his utmost to keep the story entertaining and moving along at a clever clip of pace. As each letter zips back and forth, Mary and Max’s strange queries and tales are illustrated with an endless series of humorous cutaways that do much to keep the film percolating.
A bigger problem emerges as the story rolls out further. Having one central character an Asperger sufferer and another spending a large part of the film as an eight-year-old makes it tough for the audience to relate to the clay figures on screen, even if we all get a slight touch of Max’s anxieties in our daily struggles. When Mary does grow older her character is still rendered in fairly basic brushstrokes and, ultimately, it can be easy to feel detached and disinvested in the onscreen goings-on. Not helping in this regard is Barry Humphries’ unceasing narration: while it is delivered with the kind of exacting gusto that only the famous satirist could muster, it is also so omnipresent that it serves to further distance the audience from the characters.
The detail present in the claymation of 'Mary and Max' is at times jaw-dropping.
That’s not to say Mary and Max doesn’t look like a million dollars. Elliot’s brand of claymation is every bit as engaging as Aardman’s, but benefits from a slightly grungier, more homespun flavour. And much like Harvie Krumpet before it, the filmmakers have allied the claymation to some inspired production design. Mary’s Mount Waverly is draped in dour brown, while Max copes in a rotten Big Apple, shrouded in charcoal blacks and greys. The opposing shades give Elliot and his collaborators greater scope for expression through colour, such as a pompom sent to Max by Mary that he then wears on his ashen-hued head like a big red button.
Indeed, it’s easy to admire the production design when you watch a claymation feature because you’re aware of just how much pain-staking work went into the whole thing. Added to this is Elliot’s own dedication to his characters and in particular to Max’s condition, which the director does a brilliant job of digging into, helping the audience better understand the challenges of being an Asperger sufferer. Still, admiring a film isn’t necessarily the same as enjoying it, and while Mary and Max is well worth seeing, perhaps in future a more conventional screenplay might better suit Adam Elliot’s undoubted talent.
Check out the trailer for Mary and Max below:
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