Mary and Max

Max Jerry Horovitz wants a friend. Mary Daisy Dinkle wants the same. Only problem is, Max, an obese Jew with Asperger’s syndrome and a compulsion to gorge himself silly on chocolate hotdogs (a homemade recipe), lives in New York, while Mary, an eight-year-old girl with a large poop-colored birthmark on her forehead and a zeal for sweetened condensed milk, lives in Australia. Mary randomly points to a name in the New York City phone book in hopes of gaining an answer to where babies come from in America. In Australia babies are found in beer mugs, or so Mary’s grandfather tells her. After reading Mary’s letter, Max suffers the panic attack that results whenever anything disrupts his orderly routine, but a dozen chocolate hotdogs later and after some sage advice from his shrink, Dr. Bernard Hazelfhoff, Max answers Mary’s question. Babies in America are found in eggs laid by rabbis. So begins the extraordinary correspondence between Mary and Max, two lonely souls, a little less lonely now. . Brilliantly animated by Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot and brought to life by the bravura voice work of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary and Max is a bittersweet tale of a friendship between oddballs at their wits’ end with the world, but at peace with each other. Opening Night selection, 2009 Sundance Film Festival.