Everything we could ever hope for in a friendship.

Rating: 10/10 (6 February 2015)

Not everyone can find their voice through writing, find the right rhythm or pace or just the general ideas they want to express. But when someone can write, it's often the purest form of communication. This is a film about people who can write, and write to each other, because it's their consolation and fulfilment. Mary and Max, the titular characters, two disparate figures from separate continents share and understand the world from the beginnings to ends of their pieces of paper, as it's the only way they know how. But it's not a film about writing itself; writing is the beautiful catalyst for the most beautiful friendship, a bond that binds atoms together because these characters will it, and if they will it the universe wills it too.
"Mary Dinkle's eyes were the colour of muddy puddles. Her birthmark, the colour of poo." observes the narrator in the opening lines of the film, his clear, precise voice, like that of a television presenter, perfectly capturing the tone to come. It's a simple truth, both humorous and melancholy, because in life if you have one you often have the other. These are essential elements of her, she hates them but they're fundamental to who she is. She's a lonely pre-pubescent girl in a drained, sepia Australian suburbia, an environment of grinding routine, and she is most often alone to absorb and pour over everything in her own colourful inner- life, a cauldron of innocent wonder and a quiet, growing despair, which contains ideas such beliefs such as that in Australia Babies are found in the bottom of beer mugs, and her musing over where they are found in America (she deduces that although Americans drink much Cola, Babies wouldn't be found in the cans because they'd have no means of escape) prompts her to pick at random an address in the telephone book and pose this question. She couldn't clarify this with her parents because they are not present in any sense of the word, the mother a perpetual drunk and the father an extreme recluse. This is not a decaying suburban marriage but just one of a mutual desire to be withdrawn in their own world. Or perhaps they forget the other one exists. Each person is lonely, but Mary reaches out. She doesn't expect a friendship, but serendipity grants her one, and of course she deserves it.
Does this not sound immensely relatable? And thus enters Max, a lonely obese Jew living in a stark black-and-white New York City, almost a Noirish landscape. But not one of intrigue, one of melancholy, one of good and bad, black-and-white. When Max is in his apartment, indulging in his own adventurous recipes, watching his favourite television show, the world is good. Anywhere outside is bad, where the world to him seems to favour madness over operating on any logical system. It doesn't take long to see he may have Asperger's. People are immediately distant and judgemental of him (as when he is mocked for wearing a helmet) but when Mary begins to write none of this matters. Max doesn't question the fact and 8 year old is writing to him, because initially in their minds they are just following a logical and path and asking each other's questions, and then it becomes an opportunity to express all the things that have ever crossed their mind but were never able to do any more than that. Philip Seymour Hoffman is extraordinary, with his despondent, breathless Jewish cadence, and I had I gone into the film without any knowledge I wouldn't have known it was him. In fact, the reason for me watching this was as a sort of Hoffman retrospective, in light of the one year anniversary of his untimely passing, and I thought selecting a film solely of his voice-acting would display an aspect of him not yet seen, but I realised this voice is just one of his many, and every performance was some aspect, however slight, unseen, and so this is a real testament to his ability to inhabit the character, not to announce his presence but not failing to distinguish himself either.
The film has very little story beyond this friendship, and the people that occupy their individual worlds are more or less just figures to aid their development in the world and to provide them material for their letters rather than being fully-fleshed characters, but that's OK, because what is given through their exchanges than more poignant and witty and abrasive, and just damn real than most films could achieve through this concept. It's always convincing, and that's down to how honestly portrayed these characters are; Max doesn't understand social conventions, and tells Mary that he once worked in a condom factory but has never tried one on, Mary describes her neighbour's fear of the outside as 'homophobia', and although her older self eventually uses the correct term, the film doesn't need to show us her learning her error, she eventually pursues the naïve idea that she can cure Max's Asperger's
I haven't even mentioned the animation, which is a beautiful clay style in which much looks bloated and listless and melancholy but also so lovingly and meticulously crafted that it's impossible not to admire. Clay of course is so malleable that it's almost infinite in its possibilities, and the film knows this and is able to capture every passing emotion with care. Although it's animation, this is not a children's film. It's a film of retrospect, as we watch Mary grow up - and even Max too, who grows to accept his position in the world – we see in her ourselves learning and travelling through life, and we hope, or at least I do, that we can remain as warm and as eternally optimistic as this film, which I think believes as much injustice and tragedy as there is, we are capable of balancing it out.