Starring: Voices of: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Eric Bana, Nick Cave, Adam Elliot, Tony Armstrong and Paul Capsis
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 94 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel – a hoarder of snails, romance novels and guinea-pigs.
Quite a striking experience. The title might be a bit off-putting to some audiences, especially those with a fear of snails (molluscophobia – seeing ‘snails and slugs as slow, writhing anomalies in a city full of things that flutter, stomp or scuttle). But, reassuringly, snails here have some heroic status.
Melbourne animator, Adam Elliot, won an Oscar for his short film, Harvey Krumpet. His animation style is stop-motion, and he uses clay models, giving his films a distinctive look, and, combined with his idiosyncratic characters and their stories, something of a unique position in animation. In 2008 he directed Mary and Max (admirably voiced by Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman), the story of two lonely characters’ correspondence between Melbourne and New York.
Which means that his new film is visually distinctive and admirably voiced. Adam Elliot’s visual world is dark, often misshapen, with touches of the sinister, a great deal of sadness and rare moments of joy.
Actually, the memoir is of Grace Pudel (told by Snook who is able to engage the audience completely). Grace, sad following the death of her good friend Pinky (Weaver at her best), has a vast number of collectable snails on her shelf and also cultivates actual snails, especially Sylvia to whom she confides her story.
It is a sad story. Grace’s mother dies giving birth to herself and her twin brother, Gilbert (Smit-McPhee). There are some happy moments with their eccentric French father, Dominique Pinon, an animator but who falls on hard times. Then there is their fate as orphans, and foster homes. They might be described as 21st-century Dickensian, on the one hand a kind of hippy, freethinking couple take in Grace but Gilbert is sent to Perth to a fundamentalist religious family, and a horrendous mother, Ruth (absolutely ruthless). Brought frighteningly alive by Szubanski. And Gilbert suffers.
Some of the dialogue is witty. And there are some very happy cultural references, the books that the young Grace and Gilbert read, including Lord of the Flies, and, twice, the family watching with delight The Two Ronnies.
But, back to Pinky. She is a wonderful neighbour, caring for Grace, a surrogate mother, but moving into dementia, trying to warn Grace about the charming Ken (Armstrong) who courts her but has his own terrible secret.
By this stage, Grace finishes telling her sad story to Sylvia. But, while Adam Elliot constantly reminds us that so much of life is sadness and suffering, he is not without hope and by the final credits he provides Grace with a bit more happiness than we might have anticipated.
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