Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Mary and Max was, I believe, our shared favourite film seen at the EIFF back in 2009, and at the risk of spoiling the result of this review, nothing has happened in the intervening years to make me reconsider that opinion.
Starting in 1976, a neglected and bullied eight year old Mary Daisy Dinkle of Victoria, Australia starts a penfriend relation ship with a randomly selected name from a phone book, that being Max Jerry Horowitz, who has just as many problems, from his uncontrollable and unconventional eating habits to his inability to connect and understand people, which as it turns out is due to his later diagnosed Asperger syndrome.
This follows their ongoing correspondence, and the anxiety attacks they provoke in Max, over the course of Mary’s childhood and early adulthood. Both of their lives are eventful, in a quiet, realistic and slightly depressing sense, and makes for a very human, identifiable and sympathetic narrative.
Even in an episode where nearly everything we’re speaking of is quite densely packed with gags, this stands out as being extremely densely packed with gags both visual and auditory. It’s an exceedingly sharply scripted, er, script, with terrific deliveries from Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Barry Humphries in particular. This is perhaps an odd thing to say about a film that deals so heavily with neglect, addiction, loneliness, anxiety, and suicide, but that’s really the film’s genius.
I don’t think we need to re-legislate the “animation can be for adults and deal with adult themes” discussion again, but if anyone was wavering on the point I’d direct them to Mary and Max, which deals with said themes sensitively and highly entertainingly. In an episode full of films I enjoyed immensely, I enjoyed this immenselier. If you haven’t seen it, you really ought to.