The small country (probably bigger than the UK but I failed Geography so I am just guessing) of Australia produced this film and it is about the correspondence between an obese man (Max) in Australia and a very young girl in America (Mary). They have never met and Mary's mother is not fond of her daughter talking to an obese man whom she considers to be ugly but Mary and Max keep up this correspondence throughout Mary's life until she is an adult, has graduated from college and has done well until she writes a book about Max's autism, which he doesn't like and he stops talking to her. She sinks into depression and her lover leaves her. She sends Max a cup which says 'I'm sorry' and after a long time Max sends her something back. It has been a long time since she heard from Max and Mary has become suicidal, taking some Valium and attempting to hang herself before she is interrupted by the neighbour across the road drawing her attention to the package that has been on her doorstep for a while and he saves her life. Mary goes to see Max but by the time that she gets there he has died.
I enjoyed this film until Mary attempted to kill herself and then I started to question it a little but as Francis rightly pointed out this film shows the circle of life, the good, the bad and everything else that comes with it. No matter how good your life is there will always be a bad to it and the better your life is the worse that bad is. Mary experienced the bad when everything fell apart but everything fell apart because of her mistake with Max. Max had a difficult life and he needed to let go but you can't judge how someone is going to react and if we were being critical then we would say that she should have asked Max before writing the book but she didn't so instead of going on to be a bestseller she destroys all the books and is left with nothing,
This is another reminder that life can be truly awful without friends or anyone to love you.
This film is also in black and white which can, at times, make it a little harder to appreciate or understand because there is a limited amount that you can do with the film and lot of it is totally dependent on your imagination and mine isn't that good. Stop Motion is a skill. To make a 90 min film out something in black and white which doesn't actually involve any humans being shown on screen is a difficult task. This film would have slipped past me for that reason. Wallace and Grommet only has the audience that it did because of it being a TV series. People got used to the idea of Wallace and Grommet and then they took to the film. Even though it had the names of Barry Humphreys and Phillip Seymour Hoffman on it this film still struggled. It was around the same time as Tim Burton was producing some of his films and I can't think of why this film has been so overlooked but it has and Francis is right, it is an underrated movie. I hadn't heard of this film before Francis recommended it to me and I think that a lot of people haven't heard of this film. So if you haven't heard of this film and want to appreciate all types of film then go and watch this film and experience the circle of life.
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