Memoir of a Snail | 2024
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL, courtesy of IFC Films.
Adam Elliot's 2009 film, Mary and Max, felt like something of a minor miracle at the time, a work of stop-motion animation that dealt, both seriously and humorously, with decidedly grown up themes of depression, loneliness, and mental illness. Memoir of a Snail is Elliot's first feature since his acclaimed feature debut, and while it doesn't quite reach the heights of Mary and Max, it's still a lovely film in its own right.
The "snail" in question is Grace Pudle (Sarah Snook), a lonely hoarder who's obsessed with snails, who serves as our narrator while relating her life story to her longtime pet snail, Sylvia. She tells us how she lost her father, an alcoholic animator, and got separated from her twin brother, Gerald (Kodi Smit-McPhee), shipped off to different foster homes on opposite ends of the continent. She shares her heartbreaks and traumas, a never-ending string of tragedies and unfortunate events that led her to that moment, all the while dreaming of something more, of something better, while building an impenetrable shell around herself to keep the uncaring world at bay.
It's surprisingly heavy stuff, although Elliot occasionally softens the blows with his quirky sense of humor. Yet there's a disarming beauty in its sadness, that while it may be hard to find the glimmer of hope amidst the seemingly endless tragedy, there are still small moments of kindness and love that perhaps make it all worth it. That's where the film could have gone deeper than it does - by the time we reach the end, it resolves its conflicts with a series of greeting card platitudes, quoting Kierkegaard's famous maxim "life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards" without attribution in ways that ring fairly hollow considering the weight of the the events we've just witnessed.
Still, its characters are so indelible that it's hard not to connect to them in some way, and while the sheer magnitude of the litany of tragedies on display here become almost comical, it handles them with a tenderness that compensates for the occasional weakness of the screenplay. Viewers may be reminded of My Life as a Zucchini, and while I think that film is ultimately a stronger exploration of similar themes, Memoir of a Snail is a beautifully animated charmer whose dark sense of humor gives it just enough edge to make it interesting.
