Memoir of a Snail: Australian Saga Leaves a Slime Trail of Sweetness and Irreverence
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Big eyes evoke childhood, innocence, and vulnerability. Bulging eyes suggest reptiles, nightmares, and shock. In the distinctive adult-oriented claymation films of Australian Adam Elliot the characters’ big eggy eyes suggest both childlike innocence and grownup panic, forged in an uncanny valley between mountains of melancholy and irreverent humour.
In 2004, Elliot won an Oscar for his short film Harvie Krumpet and five years later, further acclaim for his first feature, Mary and Max, about the pen-pal relationship between a lonely Australian girl (voiced by Toni Collette) and a socially isolated middle-aged American man with Asperger Syndrome (Philip Seymour Hoffman.) His latest comedy-drama, eight years in the making, is Memoir of a Snail, which won the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and last month repeated its success at the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival.
Grace and Gilbert are briefly raised by their disabled dad in Memoir of a Snail
A biographical drama with distinctly Dickensian overtones, Memoir begins with a death-bed scene, as a middle-aged woman, Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook) listens to the final bewildering words of her elderly friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver): “The potatoes!” declares Pinky before she expires.
Some time later, following Pinky’s wishes, Grace heads out to the garden to spread her ashes, at the same time as she releases her own collection of pet snails, taking time to tell her life story to her favourite, Sylvia, named after the poet, Sylvia Plath.
“Dad used to say that childhood was like being drunk,” Grace tells us in voice-over. “Everyone remembers what you did except you,”
In refutation of that observation, Grace demonstrates an uncannily detailed memory of her childhood, from the moment of being born prematurely along with her brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), in Melbourne in 1972. After their mother died shortly after their birth, the twins are haphazardly raised by their father, Percy (Dominique Pinon) a French animator and juggler, paralyzed from the waist down after being struck by a drunken driver.
Percy spends his remaining years drunk, with the occasional ecstatic family trip to a favourite amusement park to ride the Big Dipper rollercoaster. At school, Grace is mocked and bullied because of her cleft lip but at least she has the feisty Gilbert to defends her. Things soon get worse.
When their father dies, the children are sent to foster homes at either end of the country. Grace sent to Canberra raised by a smug middle-class couple, devoted to self-help books and weekend swinging parties. Gilbert is sent to Perth to suffer under the strict supervision of his religious cult of Christian apple farmers. Over the years, the twins exchange heartfelt letters, determined to reunite some day. In memory of her mother’s snail-patterned ring, Grace develops a fetish for snails and any snail-related paraphernalia. The symbolism of the snail, we are told, is that they are incapable of moving backward.
When her foster parents decide to join a nudist colony in Germany, Grace finds a new guardian, the elderly twice-widowed, free-spirited Pinky who she meets on the street. The older woman is named for the finger she lost to an overhead fan when she was an exotic dancer in Barcelona.
As Grace moves into adulthood, she becomes the failing Pinky’s caregiver. In a life of few delights, she has a brief torrid romance when she falls for the “delicious” Ken (Tony Armstrong) a microwave technician, but the affair ends after Grace discovers a disturbing side of Ken’s attraction to her. Around the same time, she receives shocking news about Gilbert, reaching a low point in her life just before we return back to the scene of Pinky’s death and her final mystifying words.
In blunt incident-filled synopsis (there’s much more) Memoir of a Snail can come across as an arbitrary assembly line of disappointment, abandonment, abuse, kink and suicidal impulses, before it pivots to a redemptive ending, which makes it sound naïve and sentimental.
But the genuine cathartic effect of the film is achieved by an accumulation of smart choices, including the dryly witty narration, the ingenious visual surreal world building using kids’ crafts table materials, the strong voice cast (including vocal cameos from Eric Bana and Nick Cave) and an elegant classical-style score. They converge into a delightfully googly-eyed therapeutic parable about breaking out of our pain-enforced protective shells.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Memoir of a Snail director Adam Elliot.
Memoir of a Snail. Written and directed by Adam Elliot. Voiced by 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, Nick Cave. Opens Friday, November 15 in Toronto (TIFF Lightbox) and Montreal. November 22 in Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Kingston. November 29 in Ottawa, and throughout the fall in other cities.