Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The four short films — Uncle, Cousin, Brother, and Harvie Krumpet (which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Feature in 2004) — directed by Australian animator Adam Elliot, are all representative of that. They utilize the medium’s comedic potential to its fullest: the malleability, and perhaps, more appropriately for Elliot, the deformability of clay allows him to construct, then gleefully corrupt, his wonderfully grotesque character models. Their designs — people and animals of all kinds with their outsized eyeballs, moldy skin, wiry hair, and imperfect body compositions — are in and of themselves amusing. But Elliot consistently mines humor, both crude and innocent, not by laughing at them in a mean-spirited sort of way, but by showing them struggling to cope with the absurdity of their specific, often consistently depressing lives. It’s comedy as a mask that hides tragedy; except, no shape or size of mask can hide the loneliness and despair expressed by the larger-than-real-life twitchy eyes of Elliot’s Claymation creations. Like the jittery body movements associated with Claymation, they communicate human feelings not perfectly but purely.
Elliot’s second feature-length film, Memoir of a Snail, is molded with the same clutter of clay, plasticine, and wires that made his shorts and his bleakly beautiful first feature film, Mary & Max (2009), stand out. This time, however, the material and effort put into making his film is doubled, tripled, and quadrupled: Elliot has spent 8 years with his team of puppet designers and stop-motion animators to create his bleakly beige-grey world of 1970s Australia, populated by his brand of eccentric and broken characters. The central one here is the melancholic Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook), a loner with a flappy lip whose life, like most all of Elliot’s characters, is filled with little else other than misfortune and death. She goes through it trapped within her spirally cage stacked full of books and, most significantly, snails — an obsession she develops because everything else nearer and dearer to her eventually dies. This includes her paraplegic and alcoholic father (Dominique Pinon), Alzheimer’s stricken oddball-friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), and, perhaps most heartbreakingly, her loving and caring brother, Gilbert (Kodi-Smit McPhee), brutally punished for “fornicating” by his ultra-religious and homophobic adoptive parents. Elliot uses Grace’s tragicomic recollection of her life (partially based on his real-life mother’s life) with these individuals to show and tell her story, and also detail their own tragicomic mini-memoirs.
It’s all — a bit like Elliot’s designs — crooked, imperfect, and a little much. But unlike the designs, whose charm and emotional power come from their deliberate shabbiness, narrative ill-discipline undermines the film’s tragicomic power. Comparisons to Elliot’s first three short films centered on his other family members are unavoidable here, as Memoir of a Snail not only directly quotes moments from them (even featuring a universe-sharing cameo from Harvie Krumpet!), but also often feels like a collection of character “clayographies,” each of which would benefit from having their own separate short film. The darkly comic montage we get every time we’re introduced to almost every supporting character, recounting their life’s many adventures consistently cut short by death or misfortune, is amusing in and of itself. (Pinky’s colorful history with the men in her life, particularly, strikes that perfect balance between being uproariously funny one minute and then deeply melancholy the next). However, as a subset of Grace’s memoir, it more often than not feels like a humorous aside: a digression that never really taps into the heartbreaking humanity of these very imperfect characters.
Worse still, when Elliot taps into an emotional sphere, he does so, for the first time in his career, by quite violently tugging at our heartstrings. Gone is the flat, almost deadpan narration of Elliot’s short films: a critical feature that utilized the inherent tension of recounting sudden and horrifying life events matter-of-factly to generate empathy with his characters. Instead, what we have in Memoir of a Snail is Snook’s lilting line deliveries that seem to actively plead for sympathy for everything and everyone exploited by bullies and bigots. Platitudes about us being able to “understand life backward, but [only being able] to live it forwards” (taken from Elliot’s short film, Uncle, in which the character delivers it most casually) are repeatedly expressed and complemented by Elena Kats-Chernin’s syrupy piano-and-violin score, which only cheapens the film’s already sickly sentimentality. Elliot’s film, then, feels more like the kind of synthesized Oscar-baity miserabilist drama that seems designed to manipulate viewers’ emotions than anything else. It may still possess all of the filmmaker’s jagged visual artistry, but there’s very little in Memoir of a Snail of his barbed approach to human emotionality.
DIRECTOR: Adam Elliot; CAST: Saran Snook, Eric Bana, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: October 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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