A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel – a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs.
Chuck says:
Beneath the grotesque aesthetic of Adam Elliot’s “Memoirs of a Snail,” lies a touching tale of resiliency and healing, one that slowly emerges from an ever-increasing series of tragedies that befall the main character. Despite incidents of abandonment, abuse and self-harm, the filmmaker manages to maintain a degree of hope. His vision of the world is one in which its inhabitants have come to expect fate to repeatedly knock them back on their heels. As such, Elliot’s characters are sympathetic and relatable, though their attitudes towards their troubles are unique and to be wished for.
Grace and Gilbert Prudel (voiced by Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee, respectively) seem plucked from a Dickens novel, as one tragedy after another plagues them. Though twins, their differences are marked and plain from the start, she being the optimistic one, he always looking at the dark side of things. Born with a cleft lip, Grace is constantly picked upon, while Gilbert, despite his small size, always comes to her defense. What with their mother dying during childbirth, they’ve been raised by their father Percy (Dominique Pinon), a paraplegic alcoholic who was once a street performer in Paris. However, soon after their 10th birthday, he too dies and the twins are separated, each sent to live with foster families on opposite sides of Australia.
Gilbert gets the worse part of the bargain, as he’s taken in by a family of religious zealots and forced to work in their apple orchard. Resisting their efforts of indoctrination, his life is one of drudgery, though he finds some solace from the most unexpected of places.
Having found various snail trinkets among her mother’s things, Grace takes to collecting not only snails, but anything that might have a picture or image of the crustacean on it. This serves as a metaphor for the character, as she retreats further and further within her own shell. After being neglected by her swinging foster parents, enduring a marriage based on deception and losing her best friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), her response to retreat from a world that has done nothing but hurt her makes sense.
The stop-motion, claymation approach Elliot employs is astonishing. The attention to detail in the environments they inhabit is remarkable. The minute touches and the sheer number of small items the populate the settings make one wish a “pause” button were handy to take in and appreciate all each image has to offer. However, more vital are the emotions the filmmaker is able to convey with this technique, the expressions on the characters’ faces as well as the postures in their bodies reminds us of the ability of stop motion animation to move the viewer in ways animation employing computer-generated effects still can’t.
Elliot’s use of color seems counterintuitive, as so much of the film is rendered in mute hues, shades of gray dominating throughout. Yet, that makes the examples of kind behavior shine all the more. The generosity shown by Pinky, James the magistrate (Eric Bana) and Gilbert are rare beacons of hope in a world seemingly constructed to crush courage and faith.
If the film has a fault, it’s with its ending which is far too neat and not earned. Yet, it’s necessary to drive home Elliot’s conceit that life needs to be embraced and cherished despite its inherent difficulties. “Memoir” proves to be a major surprise, an out-of-left-field dose of optimism that’s much needed in the increasingly dire times we live in.
3 1/2 Stars
