Mary and Max - Adam Elliot

Director: Adam Elliot

Writer: Adam Elliot

Stars: Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Eric Bana

“Mary and Max” is an unusual, difficult-to-describe movie, to say the least. The broad strokes go like this: Mary Daisy Dinkle, a crushingly lonely eight-year-old Australian girl with a largely absentee father and an overbearing monster for a mother, goes thumbing through a post office phone book, chooses a random name – Max Jerry Horovitz of New York – and sends him a letter, thus beginning a long transcontinental friendship.

It’s a friendship that both Max and Mary desperately need. Mary, with a birthmark on her forehead that looks like poop, endures terrible abuse at home and at school, while the overweight, anxious Max spends his days picking up litter and attending Overeaters Anonymous support groups between “chocolate hot dog” binges. If that sounds like an awful lot of strange darkness for one movie, it is – but it only serves to underscore “Mary and Max’s” tremendous, bittersweet heart.

As comically overstated as parts of it can seem, Elliot says “Mary and Max” is based on a true story – and in fact, the Australian filmmaker has enjoyed a 20-year pen pal friendship with a New Yorker who, like Max, has Asperger syndrome. Max’s discovery of his diagnosis is arguably the key moment in the film, setting in motion Mary’s pursuit of her life’s calling (which echoes Elliot’s real-life dedication to educating people about the disease). What really sets the movie apart, though, is Elliot’s deft way with “Mary and Max’s” larger themes – namely self-acceptance, the redemptive power of honest human connection, and the idea that life is really more about the journey than the destination. (Do not, in other words, expect a Disney-style happy ending in the third act.)

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Prepared by: Duygu Söbe