MARY AND MAX - DVD review

If his films are any indication, Adam Elliot is one strange and disturbed dude. And it's made him stand out like some of the Shrek-like ears on his male characters. The 38-year-old claymation director has only made five films, but those films have been shown at more than 600 festivals and have gathered a bushel of awards--among them, the Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated ("Harvie Krumpet," 2003). His style and vision of the world is as unique as Tim Burton's.

"Mary and Max" is his first full-length feature, and there are strains of "Krumpet" in it. The main characters are born with challenging medical conditions, they're bullied and made to feel isolated, and when life gets them down they tend to self-medicate by overeating, drinking too much, or popping pills. Some consider suicide. Apparently doomed from the start, they find solace in small epiphanies and any baby steps they might take. But it's not only the characters, it's the distinctive and quirky narration and details (like Max inventing chocolate-bar "hot dogs" or Mary's neighbor being an agoraphobic WWII vet who lost his legs to piranhas) that make Elliot's films funny, sad, and deliciously bizarre.

Eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette) has a birthmark on her head that looks so much the color of crap that everything makes fun of her. She also has thick glasses and was born into a home where her father spends more time with his taxidermy-mounted birds than he does with her. Meanwhile, her mother is a kleptomaniac and alcoholic who drinks herself into a stupor each day with cooking sherry. As the voiceover narrates from Mary's point of view and we witness the strange terrain of her Australian town, there's a sometimes funny and other times disturbing disconnect between what she says and what we see. As one neighbor's dog across the street tries to hump another, Mary watches from the window and we hear, "Mary wished she had a friend to play piggyback with." But, typical of Elliot's style, the gag never stops with just one punch line. Where there's one, there's usually more, and this verbal joke is followed by a sight gag as we see the owner shoo his animals to their respective dog houses labeled "Sonny" and "Cher."

The story begins in 1976 with Mary accompanying her mother to the town's small post office and writing down the name of a New Yorker chosen at random from a phone book. Mary, who's picked on at school and has no one to talk to at home, is so isolated that she's decided to reach out and try to strike up a pen-pal relationship. The Australian segments are in color, but when we cut to New York City to meet the recipient of her letter, everything is black-and-white. Max Jerry Horowitz (Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman), you see, is more jaded than Mary. He's been through similar experiences and prefers not to remember them, so his world is depicted as being bleaker than hers. Plus, he has problems of his own. At six feet and 352 pounds he's severely overweight, and Asperger's syndrome--a form of autism--keeps him from picking up on non-verbal communication. As a result, he tends to become paranoid and easily overwhelmed. And while Mary's first letter to him produces one large-and-tall sized anxiety attack, he musters the courage to go to his Underwood typewriter and write back. Maybe it was the candy bar she sent him. Maybe it was her shared love of "The Noblets" TV show (about a group of brown friends who live like "Smurfs" in their own idyllic village).

"Even though Max's letter smelled like fish heads and orange peel, Mary drank his words like a bowl of alphabet soup and hadn't been this excited since Grandpoppy Ralph had found a coin up her nose." When she writes him she asks important questions, like "Have you ever been teased? Can you help me?" And this kid needs it. We see a bully, knocking her down, taking her lunch, and then peeing on it. Max, meanwhile, has three goals in life, and they're numbered: "1) Friend (not imaginary), 2) Noblets, 3) Chocolate."

Time passes and people pass. But over the next 20 years these two continue to correspond, and "Mary and Max" is the story of their epistolary friendship. It sounds dull, but the art design and amount of quirky detail makes every frame a enjoyable. You haven't seen anything until you've seen a claymation pig roasting on a barbecue spit. And the narration (voiced by Barry Humphries) remains just as quirky, with such goofy things as Max adding in a PPS: "Did you know that turtles can breathe through their anuses?" Quirky stuff abounds. What's interesting as well is that Max's world goes from black-and-white to spot-color after he begins his correspondence with Mary. She's had an influence on him, and colored his world just a bit. He'll have a bright red tongue in one scene, or a bright red hair decoration on his head in another.

Despite serious social and psychological issues and coarse material, "Mary and Max" inhabits a world that is both familiar and bizarre--and both logical and illogical. One minute the cause-and-effect aspects of life seem to be enforced (as when Max's goldfish keep dying and he's up to Henry the 9th), and the next minute you have a pet chicken who seems to have the lifespan of a parrot. It's that juncture where quirkiness and the imagination meet serious human themes and life's naturalism that most fascinates Elliot. He clearly wants you to laugh in spots, to be shocked other times, to be outraged on occasion, and to be saddened others. And through it all, we can barely detect the familiar voices of Hoffman, Collette, or Bana (who appears as a Greek that briefly has a relationship with the adult Mary), they've been so absorbed by their characters. Everything seems to support the quirky details of this film. I can't remember seeing an animated feature so dark and funny and bizarre and sad, all at the same time. But it works.

Video:
This film is available in both Blu-ray and DVD, but since I was only sent the DVD it's all I can rate. I'd really like to see it in Hi-Def, though, because in standard definition there's hardly any grain and the contrast levels are really precise. They need to be with a black-and-white film, but the slightly demented-looking skyline of New York in this claymation world has a nice 3-dimensionality and equally nice edge delineation for a DVD. "Mary and Max" is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen.

Audio:
There's more power to the soundtrack than there probably needs to be, since it's voiceover narrative-driven, but the English Dolby Digital 5.1 allows for some nice ambient sounds to seep from the rear speakers, so that the audio depth complements the video depth. Subtitles are in English and Spanish.

Extras:
The best bonus feature is Adam Elliot's Oscar-winning short animated film, "Harvie Krumpet." Watch this 22-minute film and you'll see how Elliot took the basic premise and certain details and transformed them, expanded them, and exploded them into this full-length feature film I've just reviewed. It's a great bonus feature to have, and the reason I'm giving the extras a 7 out of 10.

Everything else is only okay. A "Making of" featurette around 16 minutes long is rather tedious to slog through, and isn't really a behind-the-scenes feature at all. It's various people acting cheeky and trying for joke bonus features. Rarely do these things succeed. "Behind the Scenes" is closer to a real behind-the-scenes look, but it too is random and clocks in at just a little over eight minutes. Nothing really substantial here. "Casting Call" shows Bethany Whitmore (who voices the young Mary) in a minute-and-a-half reading, while a two-minute "alternate scenes" includes an alternate ending that's also not terribly interesting. Rounding out the scant and unsuccessfully bizarre bonus features are other IFC trailers and the international and U.S. trailer for "Mary and Max."

Bottom Line:
"Mary and Max" is an oddball film of the oddest sort that places a high value on eccentricity and seems devoted to telling the stories of misfits who've been ignored or shat on by the world. It's a dark film which, unlike the "Wallace & Gromit" claymation adventures, is most certainly NOT for children. It's for adults who love to see animation used to explore adult themes and serious issues. And as such, "Mary and Max" is extremely successful.