IMDb #169 Review: Mary and Max (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

"Mary Dinkle's eyes were the color of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the color of poo."

Unpack these opening lines, and you find a microcosm of the strangest, crudest, most unabashedly peculiar thing I've watched in eons.

First, Mary. She's a quirky but plain-looking little girl from the Australian suburbs. Her family is horrible. Lonely and whimsical, she writes a letter to a random stranger in New York City, to ask where babies come from.

Thus she enters correspondence with Max, a morbidly obese, mentally troubled, middle-aged Jew. He and she happen to be fans of the same kid's cartoon about suspiciously phallic Smurf rip-offs. As she grows up, they keep in contact. With each other's guidance, they both mature in the oddest ways.

Now, "muddy puddles." Deranged poetry permeates the work; every weird metaphor sounds lovely in the narrator's silky-smooth, matter-of-fact baritone. This tasteful narrative distance contributes to the mood of a fractured fairy tale for modern times.

However, note "birthmark" and "poo." The most pungent aspect, underneath the linguistic gymnastics, is that this world is ugly. Characters are cruel, selfish, irreparably flawed, and physically hideous to boot.

Did I mention this movie's made with CLAYMATION? You know, the repulsive red-headed bastard child of the animation family? Because clay captures the ugliness. Hardly a frame goes by without referencing burps, farts, warts, wrinkles, feces, pert old-man nipples, toenail clippings, injustice, alcoholism, social anxiety, and shattered idealism. This ain't Wallace and Gromit, people.

But the flippant crudity deserves kudos for frankness. There needs to be a name for this kind of humor. Brown comedy?

On that note, "color." Australia is painted in brownish hues, New York in gray. But when Mary mails a souvenir from her exotic Southern Hemisphere lifestyle, or characters experience epiphanies (complete with literal light bulbs), color washes into the drab and turns it wonderful -- briefly.

Color fades. All the beauty in the world can't erase its faults. On this base, the goal becomes accepting, even embracing imperfection -- accepting yourself.

And when the pen pals finally meet, after years of heartache, under the most unthinkably ugly circumstances, it is a scene of agonizing beauty.

90 minutes.