Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A tale of friendship between two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York.
Mary and Max is a profoundly distinctive piece of adult stop-motion animation — Adam Elliot's claymation aesthetic is utterly singular, with its desaturated palette broken by flashes of warm color, and the film's unflinching treatment of loneliness, Asperger's syndrome, and human connection is both brave and deeply felt. The plotting is quietly brilliant, weaving decades of correspondence into something emotionally devastating. The voice performances from Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman are extraordinary — Hoffman in particular delivers a performance of remarkable nuance through narration alone. Cinematography (in the stop-motion sense) is meticulous and expressive, every frame a considered work of tactile craft. Novelty is exceptionally high — this film is genuinely one of a kind in tone, subject, and execution. The ending, while emotionally resonant and fitting, is perhaps slightly too tidy in its final emotional beat given the raw honesty that precedes it, earning a slight step down.