Sundance 2009: "Mary and Max."
The opening night slot at Sundance is customarily considered one of doom, and in that tradition "Mary and Max" is a disappointment, though just a mild one. The film, animator Adam Elliot's first feature, has many of the elements and motifs of his splendid, award-winning shorts -- a distinctive portraiture-inspired look, heavy voiceover, characters with mental or physical disabilities, misspellings, insulting newspaper headlines, accident-prone pets -- while demonstrating why, as it is, Elliot's style is better kept to a briefer form. "Mary and Max" flips between the lives of its title characters, a lonely seven-year-old Australia girl with a birthmark on her forehead and neglectful parents and an equally lonely 44-year-old obese New York man with Asperger's. Mary picks Max's name by chance out of the phonebook and writes to ask him questions about America, and despite the fact that she unknowingly pushes him into several anxiety attacks, the two...
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