Woah

Rating: 7/10 (15 February 2012)

This movie, like most things, had good and bad aspects. I will first enumerate the bad things, then the good ones.
One of the more off-putting things about this movie, for me, was its art style. People and animals are depicted in grotesquely distorted forms. I'm not sure what the purpose was for doing this. Another problem with the film was its tendency towards crude humor, lame visual gags, and slapstick comedy. As with the distorted figures, this aspect of the film did not seem to contribute positively to the work as a whole and I'm not sure why these moments of silliness were included. Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to avoid idealizing their subjects, but I think they went too far in the other direction. In general, I thought the film's explicit attempts at humor tended to misfire. For me, the humor in the film came from the characters themselves and not from things like watching goldfish be killed in a series of unlikely accidents. Another problem with the film is that its secondary characters tended to be one- dimensional, and most of them were killed off by the end of the film, either to provide "humor", advance the plot, or both. It seemed contradictory to me that the film explored the main characters' lives with such understanding and sympathy, yet treated the secondary characters as little more than moving scenery pieces.
Despite the complaints I have listed above, this film moved me deeply and I was actually in tears by the end. That's not something that happens often. So what about this film was so powerful? Its main characters. The letters the two characters write are extremely believable and yield so much information about each character. In fact, it didn't take long before I stopped thinking about Mary and Max as characters, and started thinking of them as real people. I felt that I could personally relate to both of them, and that was why the film had such a strong emotional impact on me. But the movie goes further than just creating convincing characters. Through the lives of the characters and the evolving relationship between them, the movie touches delicately on topics like loneliness, friendship, depression, disability, and what it really means to be human. (I think the film also tried to capture something of the scope of life's journey and the passage of time, but it was less successful at addressing this.)
Overall, I think the movie tried to do many things, but it really only succeeded at one thing, which was depicting the evolution of the relationship between Max and Mary. But where it succeeded, it really succeeded. 7/10 stars.