MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (2024)

Of all poets’ obsessions, snails are among the most peculiar, and they’re peculiar for a literary symbol despite their being the obsession of poets — whether it’s the earthly literal Francis Ponge or the existential Thom Gunn. Glued to the ground, their bodies are a self-contradiction of sensitive fragility and aloof brittleness. The little aliens’ only outlet to the world, and only antidote for solipsism, is the touch of their flesh and the two little tentacles diddling in front, moving ever so languidly in the penumbra between the sensual, the still, the depressive, and the stoic. Their mere being, having rarely achieved the age of one before dying of Mother Nature’s savagery, is a tribute to perseverance and existence; yet with no defence except brittle, parchment-thin armours and their insignificance, they are oppression incarnate, the very embodiment of worldly fears and pains.

For Anne Sexton the mad free-verser, whose confessional intimacy often overwhelms the readers emotionally and obliquely, it’s the “fisted” whirl of a newborn lying at mother’s breast (“Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” and “A Little Uncomplicated Hymn”), the crossroads between the carnal and the self-sacrificial (“The Breast” and “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)”), the abstruse lassitude of the men in a woman’s life, and their own frailties (“O Ye Tongues” and “Snail”). Though her meanings are often a mystery, it’s no mystery what she, in her life of abuse and torment, saw in snails that she keeps harking back to them. It is with an absurdity of the human condition that so much of our life and death is projected onto the poor little creatures, and it’s in their absurd curse — being only able to move forward and never back —that no better anthropomorphism is appropriate for existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s “Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.”

Such is the starting point of Adam Elliot’s new Memoir of a Snail. But he was no poet nor philosopher. Not the way Jean Cocteau or Kenji Mizoguchi were: he doesn’t get very far beyond that point. In stop-motion animation, already a labour-intensive niche, he ranks among the most unique. Working independently of Hollywood, he made a name for himself the only way he could: by taking his trilogy of shorts around film festivals in and out of Australia, racking up prize money for more ambitious projects, and gradually building up a wider following. By the end of the 1990s, he was already getting international recognition with merely Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998), and Brother (1999) — together adding up to no more than 20 minutes. The general style was there from the start: cockeyed kids not playing with a full deck, in a sadistic lunacy that some of the old Disney cartoons like Steamboat Willie (1928) used to have, except deadpan and biographical. They are juvenilia alright; and evident in them is his fatal shortcoming as an artist: the comically macabre details and the storybook bleak atmosphere get used and reused with each new premise and centre of focus.

With Harvie Krumpet (2003), his first featurette, he was able to dip his toe out of his comfort zone —before crawfishing out. It’s more or less to be expected whenever a narrative expands and characters materialise beyond mere sketches, but it was here that he proved himself equally competent in working with a structure, as he did with clays and stills cameras in his shorts. Sicknesses and ludicrous tragedies pervade the life of the dim-witted Polish-born Harvie, who kept on going despite them. If this were computer animation it might have been harder to shake off. Often when you are little, stop-motion may give you the chills with how lifelike the figures appear, and how dead they feel when they move, like those clown dolls staring at you still in the night’s shadow, or the defective talking toys that turn themselves on for a jump scare. Elliot’s gift is in how he could use the same eerie qualities and turn it the other way: in his hands, the uncanny valley becomes evanescent and zany, not unlike the best of Wallace & Gromit.

The same repetitions blind your irises, however. Though his subdued yet unsophisticated sentimentality is often infectious, Elliot isn’t quite the master storyteller that he’s a visual showman. He picks out queer traits, pet phrases, and cardboard similitudes from his notebook, pieces them together, and calls it a character. Not only does he reuse these same character types, themes, elements, and devices, but he doesn’t bother to reformulate them. If an ailing uncle dropped the Kierkegaard quote out of nowhere in an early short, expect a blind grandmother to do the same to our young adult protagonist, verbatim, in a later feature. In this sense, he’s doing no more than what Disney and other big animation studios have done for the last two decades. What he has, and what they don’t, is his existentialism and his own flavour of idiosyncratic humour derived from Edward Gorey; if Jean-Pierre Jeunet adapted a Brothers Grimm folktale set in modernity, it might look something like this. Elliot loves his trademarks and signatures too much; they become their own kind of clichés: he never plagiarised commercial animation, because he borrows from his own stock. Perhaps it’s his self-aggrandisement of being an “auteur”. Aesthetically, it’s the kind of thing that monotonised the look and feel of an entire filmography, like Woody Allen’s. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

And if you’ve got to see them all, better make your entryway as best an experience as possible. To date, Mary and Max (2009) is still your best bet. The two juxtaposing perspectives—that of an introverted, unworldly condensed-milk-addict kid (Toni Collette) in suburban Australia, and that of an obese, autistic, middle-aged Jew (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in New York —gave the movie much human dimension and emotional intelligence the way none of Eliott’s other works have quite captured. Usually, a narration does about half of the heavy lifting: the cardboard characters, only capable of knee-jerk groans and woos, are brought to life only by the voice of his unreliable narrators (Barry Humphries in Mary and Max, Geoffrey Rush in Harvie Krumpet, William McInnes in the three shorts, and John Flaus in Ernie Biscuit); it’s as if they’re only understandable and communicable on the inside, imprisoned by their external appearance. Not Mary and Max, in which most of the narration were done by the two pen pals’ letters. The humour often verges on the farcical, without ever losing sight of warmth and acceptance, recalling the best of Federico Fellini. Whenever Max undergoes a mental breakdown being incapable of dealing with Mary’s nescience, you feel as if you’re breaking down with him—by overcoming with laughter.

Memoir of a Snail doesn’t have the same balance of childlike wonder and irreverent tragicomedy. Born into the grey, sunless world motherless, alongside a pyromaniac twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), with a paraplegic father Percy (Dominique Pinon) (already sounding so archetypically “Adam Elliot”), Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) loses what little she had before she reached maturity —her father to sleep apnoea, her brother to the monstrously inhuman foster home system, her Maude-Chardin-esque soulmate Pinky (Jacki Weaver) to Alzheimer’s — and develops a snail fetish along the way as a coping mechanism for suicidal depression.

Replacing the third-person narrator, Sarah Snook (Succession) has so much vulnerability in that plump timbre of an ostracised, shabby schoolgirl. Her character doesn’t leave room for something more varied, but she’s of a piece here, which is more than can be said for others in the cast; as they were given so little, it’s she who has to bear the burden of holding the movie together. Elliot’s sensibility resembles more closely the nostalgic prose of an overgrown child than fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Dickensian dramas, or Golden Age cartoons. No surprise then, that the family of five sitting in front of me kept babbling with disinterest, and left a little over halfway.

The tragedies in Grace’s life get more outrageously absurd as they go, and the absurdities pile on top of each other: they are not emotionally rounded. Elliot milks the doom-and-gloom out of whatever he can and coaxes situations into shocks wherever he will. It’s like Arthur Miller and Ernest Hemingway at their worst: not so much their overt pessimism, but the elements and devices are so heightened they often degenerate into self-parody, with no wit. The idea of long-distance communication between two lonely individuals worked in Mary and Max because it was so central to the character’s sense of self and their personal growth. But here, there’s nothing else to Grace and Gilbert’s exchange of letters except their worsening lives and apparent longing for each other, which gradually wears thin.

Elena Kats-Chernin’s tunes were euphonious and ran deep. Without her music, the melodrama would be left awkwardly naked. If you are familiar with Adam Elliot’s work, this does not offer much more. But if you’ve shed tears for Mary and Max, and taken the time to recommend it to friends and family, then it doesn’t hurt to take some more this weekend at the cinema, and give this one a try. Otherwise, this one may deprive you of some of Mary and Max’s ardour and charm, without the same payoff.

AUSTRALIA | 2024 | 94 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • FRENCH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Adam Elliot.
voices: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Nick Cave & Jacki Weaver.