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Mary And Max (Film)
Rating: PG
Running Time: 92
Country: Australia
Director: Adam Elliot
Cast: Eric Bana, Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Distributor: Icon
Film Worth: $15.00
Release Date: April 09, 2009
“…close to a work of genius.”
The most interesting, complex characters you will probably meet all year are puppets. Made of clay, plastic and polymer, Mary, with her off-centre mouth, and Max, with his oddly-shaped head, are comical looking. But they tell a serious, made-for-adults tale, full of compassion, humanity and wit. Written and directed by Australian Adam Elliot (the brains behind the Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet), the claymated Mary And Max is a classic case of an unlikely friendship between two achingly lonely outsiders.
It's 1976 in Australian suburbia. Mary Daisy Dinkle is eight-years-old. She lacks confidence, is self-conscious about a "poo-coloured" birthmark, and harbours a burning question: do American babies come from the same place as Australian babies? In Australia, of course, babies are found in the bottoms of beer glasses. Mary gets hold of a US phone book and, hoping to solve this facts-of-life mystery, writes at random to one Max Jerry Horowitz, a Jewish New Yorker with Asperger's Syndrome. Their long-distance friendship, based on Elliot's real life pen-pal, spans twenty years and follows an unpredictable course that is often humorous and will leave you genuinely moved.
Bethany Whitmore, who voices Mary as a child, and Toni Collette, who does the honours for Mary the adult, are superb. A nuanced Philip Seymour Hoffman disappears inside his character - he's almost too good as the weary, overweight Max, towering above a splendid voice cast that includes Eric Bana, Renee Geyer, Ian "Molly" Meldrum, narrator Barry Humphries, and Elliot himself in a couple of small roles.
Having previously been restricted to the short film format, here Elliot finally has a feature-length movie to stretch his wonderfully unrestrained imagination into. He's not only a gifted animator, but a master storyteller, and this is close to a work of genius.