Mary and Max

For all of the praise that Up garnered around this same time for maturely handling grief, regret, and death, I never quite warmed up to it. I appreciated it at an arm’s length, but Mary and Max handles similar material with more aplomb. Mary and Max is quite possibly one of the bleakest and despairing animated films, a meditation of two sad, damaged individuals struggling deeply to form a connection. This connection, surprisingly intimate and warm despite being over letters, also gives the film a counterbalance of hope, joy, and humanity.

2009 was a banner year for animation, not only did we see the release of these two films, but even lesser efforts like 9, commendable ones like The Princess and the Frog, and neo-classics like Coraline, Ponyo, and Fantastic Mr. Fox all saw release. Each of those films obtained some measure of respect and an audience, yet Mary and Max was handled poorly. Pity, while the target audience may be hard to determine, this film deserved a better rollout than to just be dropped on Video-on-Demand with little fanfare.

The story concerns the decades-long friendship between Mary, a young Australian girl with a rough home life, and Max, a middle-aged mentally ill New Yorker. They communicate through letters, with Max frequently oversharing adult situations and themes that Mary would have no clue how to process or what they meant. Mary, meanwhile, shares stories of an alcoholic mother, absentee father, and isolated childhood. Individually, their lives are sad and damaged, but when brought together they find some measure of happiness and understanding between them.

The film is unconcerned with traditional narrative, preferring to craft a series of vignettes populated by eccentrics, and colored in muted tones with an occasional splash of crimson. Sight-gags and strange choices in character design make this world feel welcoming at first glance, until one realizes just how depraved and twisted everything is swirling around these two optimists. The emotional heft of the film ultimately prevails as hopeful, despite numerous accidental deaths and suicide attempts along the way. These two characters share a common thread of innocence, of hopefulness, that the world cannot extinguish no matter how hard it tries. The climatic revelation is a touching, even heartbreakingly tender portrait of what a connection between two people can inspire. The comfort we find in this final passage is a hard-won victory against the anguish of so much that transpired before it.

Mary and Max may not be a movie for everyone, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t absolutely adore it. Here was a movie that tackled difficult, often tricky subject matter head-on with humanity, wicked humor, and a frankness that is refreshing. Many animated films have touched me deeply, but I don’t know of another one that did the feat quite as sublimely as this one did.