Mary and Max is the Rare Movie About Autism That Gets Everything Right

Finally, a GOOD movie about autism.

Fifteen years ago I saw the Australian stop-motion animated comedy-drama Mary and Max at Sundance, where it was an opening night selection.

The debut feature film of writer-director Adam Elliott, who won the Academy Award for Best Short Film for 2003’s Harvey Krumpet, is the kind of minor miracle that makes me miss covering the Sundance Film Festival every year. It was exhausting. I’d see movies all day and night and write until three or four in the morning but I felt blessed to be able to experience movies before anyone else could. It’s too bad that I’ll never attend another film festival ever again.

I remember being moved and amused by Mary and Max. It’s the kind of movie film festivals were created for: a heartfelt, handmade gem realized through stop-motion animation, the most impractical, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and obsessive form of moviemaking known to man.

To devote so much time and effort to a story, you have to believe in it with your whole heart and soul.

I had no idea just how powerfully I would come to relate to Max, a New Yorker voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in one of his finest and most overlooked performances.

I relate to Max today on a painful level. Like me, he is a lonely, depressed, bald, middle-aged Autistic Jewish man unhealthily obsessed with children’s entertainment who feels out of place in a world that he does not understand and that, in turn, does not understand him.

I am Max. His struggles are my struggles. His sadness is my sadness. His confusion is my confusion. True, I am not morbidly obese, and my life is not quite as solitary as Max’s, but that does not keep me from feeling like Mary and Max is telling my story with great sensitivity and care.

Writer-director Adam Elliott’s labor of love, which took over a year to make, follows the unlikely long-distance friendship between two inveterate outsiders. Hoffman voices Max, an eccentric atheist who grew up an Orthodox Jew, while Toni Collette voices the grown-up version of Mary, a lonely Australian girl who finds Max’s name in a phone book and decides to become his pen pal.

Max and Mary’s lives are defined by tragedy, rejection, abandonment, and loneliness. Mary’s father lives a life of quiet desperation as an anonymous factory worker who finds escape from life’s cruelty in drinking and taxidermy. Mary’s father leads an even sadder life as an alchoholic who is also a kleptomaniac.

Max finds the world and its inhabitants overwhelming, bewildering, and confusing, a portmanteau of his creation that combines confused and befuddling.

Receiving a letter from a stranger on the other side of the world makes Max anxious. It almost inspires a panic attack. Then again, everything makes Max anxious.

This is another area in which I relate to Max. Every human interaction fills him with anxiety and fear.

In one of his first missives, Max writes to Mary, “I find humans interesting but have trouble understanding them.”

I likewise find humans interesting and have trouble understanding them. That’s why I became a writer; my literary career represents an ongoing, generally unsuccessful attempt to understand the world and my place in it.

Though Max finds the world incomprehensible and leads a friendless existence, he writes Mary, “I think, however, I will understand and trust you. You appear very happy.”

For Max, opening himself up to the mere possibility of understanding and trusting another human being is a life-changing development.

Mary and Max find what they want most from the world in one another: friendship. They find a life-affirming escape from the loneliness and misery of their difficult lives.

The titular protagonists share a fondness for a children’s program like The Smurfs called The Nobblets that they adore because it inhabits a world where everything is sane and orderly, and everyone is kind and has lots of friends, unlike the tragicomic worlds they inhabit separately and together.

A light shines on their dark existences in letters that give the unhappy American and the even more miserable Australian a reason to get up every morning and trudge through a life that seemingly has nothing to offer but misery.

Mary grows up to have a painful crush on a neighbor she marries despite him possessing a disinterest in women sexually that everyone other than her can see.

Inspired by her relationship with her only friend, Mary, who is probably on the spectrum herself, excels in college and writes a book about what the film calls Asperger’s. She dedicates her professional life to trying to cure someone who does not think he needs to be cured.

Before Mary becomes a college student and then an academic, Max writes Mary that Max’s psychiatrist says his brain is defective but that one day there will be a cure for his disability.

This fills Max with anger. He confides in Mary, “I do not like it when he says this. I do not feel disabled, defective, or need to be cured. I like being an Aspie. It would be like trying to change the color of my eyes.”

Mary sees her book about Max and his neurological condition as an act of love and kindness towards seemingly the only person who has consistently shown her kindness.

Max, whose emotional life resembles an ocean with a deceptively calm surface but hurricanes raging just underneath, cannot handle Mary’s book or the well-intentioned but misguided thinking behind it.

The world is too much for Max. He cannot handle it in its disorienting immensity and intensity. He doesn’t understand that it doesn’t matter how zealously you try to protect yourself and your emotions from the unwanted incursions of the outside world: you’re going to get hurt anyway because that’s an, unfortunately, central part of life.

Hoffman finds the perfect note of world-weary exhaustion and tender vulnerability. In collaboration with Elliott, he has created a character that ranks among the finest and most profound in his extraordinary but tragically brief career.

Though Collette is prominently billed on account of being one of Australia’s biggest stars, she’s less of a presence than the child actress who plays Mary as a child.

The world in Mary and Max is cruel. Its protagonists are homely in a way that makes an already sadistic world seem even harsher, but they have each other. That alone is enough to make an unlivable world seem more manageable.

I liked Mary and Max when I saw it at Sundance. I loved it when I re-watched it for the piece I wrote for The Dissolve, covering Hoffman’s entire film career. I wept like a goddamn baby watching it in the endless shadow of my recent autism (and ADHD and bipolar 2) diagnosis and the autism of both my sons.

My wife came at the end and saw me crying. That’s okay. It’s okay to have emotions and feel things deeply, even if you feel like a weird robot much of the time.

Mary and Max is not only one of the most honest and authentic depictions of autism in film, but it’s also one of the most trenchant and insightful looks at loneliness, depression, and mental illness.

You don’t have to be neurodivergent to get Mary and Max. I didn’t know I was autistic the first two times I saw it, but knowing just how much I have in common with Max made me appreciate it in a whole new way.