Mary Takes it to the Max

Asperger's Syndrome is one of those illnesses I like to think I know a thing or two about (I feel that way about almost everything, save for organic chemistry and other sciences that float far beyond my intellectual capacities). And yet, I know very little about the topic. I can take some solace in the fact that even the experts don't totally understand what is happening in great detail. For the most part, they are dealing with the results rather than the causes. I bring this to your attention because Academy Award winning writer and director Adam Elliott has released "Mary and Max", a claymation tale of pen-pal friendship where one has Asperger's. While the credits claim it to be based on a true story, it seems that the only relationship to the truth is that Adam has a pen-pal with Asperger's.

Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni Collette) is eight years old and living in a small town in Australia in the 1970's. She is teased by her playmates because of a slight discoloration on her forehead and spends most of her time either alone or under the gaze of her sherry-swilling, kleptomaniac mother. Her father is always either at work, where he attaches strings to tea bags, or at home practicing taxidermy. Like many children, she doesn't quite fit in anywhere so she spends the bulk of her time alone and unhappy. That all changes when she opens a phonebook in a store and chooses a name at random and writes to that person.

That person is Max Jerry Horowitz (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a man of 44 who resides in New York City. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew but is now an atheist, apparently because of the heartaches life has handed him. Max is the one suffering from Asperger's. Like Mary, Max has never fit in with any group. His illness makes him unable to communicate his feelings clearly. He has trouble understanding them himself so he receded into the background, living an odd life in his lonely apartment with his various pets. His only interactions are with an elderly, nearly blind woman who lives down the hall.

Mary and Max build their first friendship together, and while this might sound cloying, it is anything but. Elliott has created a world where darkness of spirit meshes seamlessly with pure innocence. Max's world alternately bounces between the two extremes while Mary lives mostly in a world of total innocence and loneliness, until she reaches an age where her understanding of the world and people helps her process everything around her.

"Mary and Max" is primitively drawn but is nonetheless very powerful in appearance, especially in the way it portrays New York. Max looks and sounds a tad like Rodney Dangerfield mixed together with Zippy the Pinhead. I assume that this is unintentional. By the time "Mary and Max" draws to a close, the audience has become involved in the character's lives. We truly care about both of them, through their respective pains and incremental gaining of self-respect, each teaching the other life lessons that they could not learn by themselves. This is strictly for adults. Much of the humor, and there is a surprising amount of hearty laughs here, will fly right past children. If you can handle animation you will be richly rewarded by your viewing of these two claymation characters that are far more real than the three-dimensional actors populating the bulk of screens.