Adam Elliot’s latest stop-motion film, Memoir of a Snail, catalogues the many misfortunes of Grace Pudel.
Grace (Sarah Snook) is an introverted, sensitive child sent to live in Canberra after her father dies. Her twin brother and defender Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is sent to live in Western Australia with a family of religious fundamentalists. Their lives are miserable, but Grace makes friends with the irrepressible Pinky (Jacki Weaver), an elderly eccentric who helps pull Grace out of her shell.
There are a few things to commend in Memoir of a Snail, including some deft comic observations about the sexual culture of Canberra, but the comedy is thin on the ground in the face of the frankly miserable Grace’s sad-sack monologue. Where Elliot’s prior film Mary and Max cleverly used ironic juxtaposition between its innocent narrators’ descriptions of events and the darker reality depicted by the animation, Memoir of a Snail features a character who tells you at unbearable length why she is miserable and the animation just depicts exactly what she’s saying in an ostensibly comic way. It’s a real slog.
Memoir of a Snail is not a subtle film. Elliot put a lot of work into the animation and really tried for something heartfelt, but Grace is such a tedious, joyless, charmless bore that it’s impossible to root for her. Its depiction of almost everyone who isn’t Grace as a vicious troglodyte calls to mind that aphorism about people who keep running into arseholes all the time actually being the arsehole themselves. The depiction of Gilbert’s adoptive family as neanderthal-browed Christians using their children as slave labour also goes from mildly amusing to repetitive and then hackneyed, and feels like the product of a dated, one-sided grudge. Elliot does make some keen observations about wounded people retreating into hoarding and other anxiety-driven avoidant behaviour, but the tone is too didactic and it’s coming out of the mouth of someone you’re desperate to flee.
Memoir of a Snail will appeal to the type of viewer who is happy to see the depiction of misery as a noble end in and of itself, but fans of Mary and Max’s deft, sweet-natured comic handling of dark subject matter will find that entirely missing from this film.