Film Festival 09 - Mary and Max
Mary and Max
Australia 2008, 92m
Director: Adam Elliot
Festivals: Sundance, Berlin, Edinburgh 2009
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 underway. As in Elliot's
Oscar-winning Harvie Crumpet, every precious moment is wrought from
clay. - Bill Gosden
www.maryandmax.com
