Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max is a funny, melancholy animation that takes lonely people seriously without requiring them to become agreeable. We recommend it warmly, though its accumulation of misfortunes sometimes wears down the pleasure of their company.
Adam Elliot makes this film for anyone who has found a letter easier than a conversation. A lonely Australian girl and a New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome become pen friends, and the film gives their attempts at understanding each other unusual patience. We recommend it for that patience, the voices and the care taken over its clay people. The humour can be coarse and the sadness overworked, but Elliot seldom treats either character as a convenient excuse for a lesson.
Gerald Thompson’s cinematography preserves the tactile pleasure of the animation: these figures look as though they occupy space and have weight. As production designer, Elliot makes their awkward shapes expressive enough that we can read a mood before anyone speaks. The visual jokes can be grotesque, and he does not tidy up his characters to make them easier to like. Colour helps give them a distinct presence. We can enjoy the workmanship without forgetting the people it serves.
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is the strongest reason to stay with it. His measured delivery gives the impression of someone considering each word before entrusting it to another person, and the humour survives without a wink towards the audience. Bethany Whitmore and Toni Collette give Mary vulnerability without making her merely helpless. Between them, the performances allow these correspondents to be difficult, funny and worth listening to. We were moved by their letters, because the effort to be understood is audible in the voices.
Barry Humphries’s narration supplies a drier kind of company, describing peculiar behaviour with a composure that makes it funnier. Elliot’s writing also understands how much can go wrong when people try to explain themselves on paper. The letters are a useful form for this story: neither correspondent can immediately correct what the other has taken the wrong way. That delay gives ordinary misunderstandings a weight that spoken exchanges, with their quick reassurances, might not have.
Bill Murphy’s editing keeps the individual comic passages tidy, but cannot quite prevent the succession of troubles from becoming repetitive. At 92 minutes, the film occasionally feels longer than it needs to, particularly when another eccentric detail arrives after we have understood the person it describes. Dale Cornelius’s music brings warmth to the exchanges without erasing their discomfort. The voices need little assistance, though, and some of the sadness would be more effective if Elliot allowed it less emphasis.
The broader difficulty is the switch between bodily jokes and serious distress. Elliot is entitled to put both in the same film; people do not become less ridiculous because they are unhappy. A few transitions nevertheless feel abrupt, asking us to laugh and then feel concern before the previous joke has settled. The writing is usually compassionate enough to get away with this, but occasionally we become too aware of how hard it is working to upset us.
Animation need not make outsiders lovable, and this film is better for declining to do so. Its interest in friendship includes the inconvenience of it: another person may need patience when we have none to spare. There is no need to mistake the clay for a promise of gentle viewing. Choose it for an evening when funny and sad are both welcome, and when a friendship conducted in letters sounds like enough of a story.
