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Dear Mary Daisy Dinkle... Dear Max...
After "Harvie Krumpet", winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 2003, we hoped that the distribution companies would have a bit of heart, or perhaps a bit more common sense, and that the next work of Adam Elliot would be seen in some Italian theaters as well.
Made with the stopmotion claymation technique, the film opened the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and received accolades around the world. Asia, America, Europe.
In Italy, it was shown at an important Milanese festival, where the film received not a little acclaim, and then, as if by magic, it disappeared. Like an important letter lost among a thousand others.
The film tells of an impossible friendship: that between an 8-year-old Australian girl and an obese, troubled, Jewish New Yorker.
They start writing letters by chance. After some adventurous correspondence, they find out they are essential to each other.
Mary poses existential questions to Max that contribute to increasing his paranoias. "Do babies come out of beer? Have you ever been in love? Have you ever been alone?".
Max and Mary share experiences and advice, fears and sorrows. Pen pals at vast distances, they often understand each other, and few times end up misunderstanding.
With amazement, we let ourselves be carried away in this caravan of emotions that make you smile and cry at the same time.
Behind us roars the world of mental illness, too heavy to dismiss, too well presented by the author - as if it were a book of applied behavioral analysis - and that of time passing, extinguishing dreams and illusions, cradled throughout a childhood that awakens adult and alone, suddenly.
The voices of Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Toni Collette, and Bethany Whitmore are the perfect continuation of the movements, disorders, actions of the protagonists. And hearing Hoffmann's voice bringing this fat, magnificent portrait of the average American to life, sometimes brings to mind him, Philip in flesh and blood, offering voice and body to another solitary madman: Allen from the magnificent "Happiness".
That our destiny is to struggle to find rare gems of cinema is well known.
Take this review as a sincere invitation to find one.
"Not much has happened since I last wrote except for my manslaughter charges, lotto win and Ivy's death".
(Max Jerry Horowitz)
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