Mary and Max

If you like to leave the cinema feeling that you're more well-adjusted than the characters in the movie you've just watched, then this could be the movie for you. You may also leave with the feeling you've been laughing at people with unfortunate disabilities, which might or might not be a good thing. Mary and Max is an oddball movie about oddball characters which does make you laugh but is rather a sad tale overall. Mary is a friendless bespectacled child with an alcholic mother and "eyes the colour of mud and a birthmark the colour of poo" who gets Max's name and address out of the New York telephone directory and begins a correspondence with him, hoping he'll answer her burning questions about life the universe and everything.

Max is overweight, Jewish, anxious and afflicted by Aspergers syndrome. He doesn't have any friends either, which is possibly what inspires him to write back to an Australian child that he's never met. He does his best to answer her questions even though some of them ("where do babies come from?" for example) cause him panic attacks that last for hours.

Based on a true story, the movie follows the correspondence all the way to its end - which is many years later when Mary is an adult. It makes you ponder the meaning and mechanics of friendship and human relationships and is probably quite unlike any movie you've seen for a while.

Anne's rating 3/5