Crammed with absurd and wonderful detail, this claymation feature from Oscar winner Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet) is a mordantly funny tale of pen-friendship between a lonely Australian girl and a paranoid Manhattanite.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2009
Mary and Max 2008
Adam Elliot’s mordantly funny account of a decades-long correspondence between two hopelessly marooned loners is crammed with absurd and wonderful details. And his fellow-feeling for the line-up of comically tragic misfits who populate his world is so clearly authentic that you may want to claim some of it for yourself. In 70s suburban Australia eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle needs to know where babies come from, but she isn’t getting much change out of her blowsy, alcoholic mother. Picking a name at random from a Manhattan phonebook, she addresses her question to one Max Horovitz. A reclusive, paranoid 44-year-old Jew (hilariously voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman), his immediate response is severe trauma. But he gets his act together, writes back – at vast length – and the strangest, most erratic of mutually supportive pen-friendships is under way. As in Elliot’s Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, every precious moment is wrought from clay. — BG