Producers: Liz Kearney and Adam Elliot Director: Adam Elliot Screenplay: Adam Elliot Cast: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Bernie Clifford, Davey Thompson, Charlotte Belsey, Mason Litsos and Nick Cave Distributor: IFC Films
Grade: B+
Embracing Adam Elliot’s second Claymation or, to use his preferred term, Clayography feature requires a rather skewered sense of humor, but those possessing one will find it both funny and poignant, sad and, in the end, life-affirming. In wonderfully tactile, imaginative hand-crafted animation supervised by John Lewis, “Memoir of a Snail” tells a wildly off-kilter tale of twin Australian siblings whose lives are wracked by multiple tragedies but wind up happy in the end. You could call it Dickensian, but with a flavor all its own.
Their story is told in autobiographical terms by Grace Pudel (voiced as a child by Charlotte Belsey and a grown-up by Sarah Snook) as she sits morosely remembering her recently-deceased best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver, deliciously over-the-top), a high-spirited eccentric. Grace’s English mother died giving birth to her and her brother Gilbert (Mason Litsos as a boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee as a young man) in 1972. Their father Percy (Dominique Pinon), a Frenchman who’d met his wife-to-be while busking as a juggler in Paris (a side job supplementing his work as a stop-motion animator) and followed her to Melbourne, gave Grace her mother’s collection of snail-themed knickknacks, which became symbolic of her mollusk-style attitude of shelling herself off from society—a trait accentuated by the bullying she suffered over her cleft lip, which led nasty kids to call her rabbit-face, and by a cap, topped by some pipe cleaners adorned with ping-pong balls for eyes, she wore. Gilbert always rose to her defense, but the pint-sized kid was mostly obsessed with matches, dreaming of becoming a fire-eating busker someday. Grace, meanwhile, performed acts of kindness on her own, like tending to a drunkard named James (Eric Bana), an erstwhile judge removed from the bench for conduct unbecoming.
The twins became orphans when Percy, who was confined to a wheelchair after being struck down by a drunken driver while performing (and had become an alcoholic himself), died shortly after taking them on a roller-coaster ride in a local amusement park. They were separated, with Grace adopted by a pair of self-improvement-minded swingers, Ian and Narelle (both voiced by Paul Capsis) in Canberra, the city in Australia’s extreme east advertised as the world’s safest, and Gilbert sent to live with a family of religious zealots headed by Ruth (Magda Szubanski) and Owen (Bernie Clifford) in far-west Perth.
We’re informed of the experiences of both, Grace’s through her own recollections and Gilbert’s through the letters he sent her. Grace attempted to make social contacts but mostly remained isolated, her marriage to a handyman named Ken (Tony Armstrong) having turned out badly, until she met the elderly Pinky, once an exotic dancer but now a wickedly wild old lady who became her confidante and, in a way, mentor. Much time is devoted to Grace’s recitation of Pinky’s real or imagined adventures, including two hilariously brief marriages (one to a character voiced for a few seconds by Nick Cave) and encounters with the likes of John Denver and Fidel Castro. With Pinky Grace develops a rare real friendship. She also experiences karma when James returns at a pivotal moment in her endless efforts to secure every bit of snail collectables she can. (She also maintains a family of real snails in a bottle, and is finally freeing them while weeping over Pinky’s demise. We’re periodically directed to the slow progress of her favorite, Sylvia, as she continues her halting movement forward—serving not only as a symbol of all life’s inevitable motion, but as the means by which Grace realizes the location of a lost treasure.)
Though Grace’s life is a struggle, Gilbert’s is worse. His adoptive family own an apple orchard and compel him to work in the business, paying him little and forcing to give over the pittance he makes to their oddball church. Ruth punishes the rebellious boy at every opportunity, and when she finds that he and one of his foster brothers, Ben (Davey Thompson), are developing what she considers an unhealthy relationship, she organizes a hideously torturous exorcism that leads Gilbert to exercise his pyromaniac proclivities against the clan. The result, unhappily, is the boy’s death, reported by Ruth to Grace on the very eve of her wedding to Ken. Happily, the demise turns out to be of the Mark Twain variety, and just as Grace is unveiling her first effort at a stop-motion film. a dream inspired by her father, she gets the surprise of a lifetime.
As all this will indicate, “Memoir of a Snail” is not a film directed toward children, unless they be tykes with the adult tastes of young Grace and Gilbert, who are shown reading such tomes as “Lord of the Flies” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.” It’s also remarkably mature in terms of its eroticism; Pinky’s amorous inclinations and the ultimate residence of Grace’s adoptive parents at a nudist colony suggest as much, and when it comes to Ken’s interest in Grace, and Ben’s in Gilbert, it moves into territory parents might feel wary about their offspring watching.
But for grown-up viewers who appreciate something off the beaten track, this abundantly clever example of animation that magically melds tragedy and comedy will prove a consistently inventive and engaging treat, delivered with scruffy visual panache by Elliot (the production designer as well as writer-director), his stop-motion crew and editor Bill Murphy. Nor should one overlook the superlative voice work down the line and the lovely score by Elena Kats-Chernin, which manages to reflect the essence of each changing mood with its piano and violin solos and alternating bubbly and morose tones.
Elliot has fashioned a “Memoir” that’s genuinely worth remembering.