Movie review: Memoir of a Snail

(courtesy IMP Awards)

You could be forgiven for wondering if life has any redeeming features at all in master stopmotion animator Adam Elliot’s lates feature-length triumph, Memoir of a Snail.

That’s not because the writer-producer-director is some kind of irredeemable pessimist; he is in fact wonderfully optimistic in the face of a great many things that could all be used, individually or together, to suggest that life has nothing to recommend and might be best left alone

Rather, the reason you might muse about the appeal and saleability of life is because Memoir of a Snail is inflinchingly honest about how dark things can get and how hard it can be to hold your head high, to keep heart hopeful and your soul buoyant when even after event seem to indicate that’s all wishful thinking and fairy-floss stupidity.

As the title might suggest, this surprisingly upward-looking film, which sees the stars more than the mud despite musing that life is often more swamp than astronomical delight, features snails heavily and while you might wonder what could possibly be attractive about creatures that are routinely treat as pests and gardening monsters, Memoir of a Snail will have you convinced by the end that maybe they need a better PR machine.

Like, for instance, and for always, Memoir of a Snail.

The film centres on how much snails means to its much out-upon protagonist Grace aka Gracie Pudel (Charlotte Belsey as Young Gracie, Sarah Snook as Adult Gracie) who clings them as a way of not only connecting with her mother but of building a world, an interior one and a very much exterior one, in which she can feel safe.

People, like the bullies at school or questionable love interests might treat her very poorly indeed but snails, like one her five beloved pets, Sylvia, will never let her down and as she suffers loss after soul, and soul-sapping horror after heart-eviscerating terror, she retreats further and further into this safe place she has fashioned for herself.

You can understand why when you watch the charming but emotionally brutal gem that is Memoir of a Snail.

In short order, Gracie loses a great deal including the close companionship of her twin brother, Gilbert (Mason Litsos as a Young Gilbert, Kodi Smit-McPhee as an Adult Gilbert), for reasons that must be left to the watching of the film, and her only real recourse seems to be to shut out reality in the 1970s Australia in which she’s growing up with bountiful Chiko rolls and books aplenty to read, and craft her own home away from home.

It’s a strategy employed by many of us who have suffered great trauma, and it makes sense in one respect – shut out the stuff you can’t control and which has the capacity to hurt you and only keep the stuff you know, in Gracie’s case snails, real and manifactured (she turns into a hoarder of snail everything), and all will, be well.

But as Gracie discovers when she gets to know rules-be-damned, avuncular octogenarian Pinky (Jackie Weaver in gloriously exuberant form), what starts out as a sanctuary can quickly become a cage, and while cage do protect you, they can also steal from and hinder you.

In fact, in one of the many sage observations that fill Memoir of a Snail with as much wisdom as it has empathy and gleeful cheekiness, Pinky observes that the cages that imprison most comprehensively are the ones we make for ourselves, and while we don’t set out for them to be prisons, that’s precisely what they become.

Memoir of a Snail, which feels like the most beguiling sweet and yet darkly insistent therapy sessions you will ever have, acknowledges that when you have suffered great trauma, it’s all too easy to become consumed and lost by the past.

Gracie has kind of become stuck there, and feels like that is the only way she can live life, but as Pinky says to her in another beautiful moment of sage camaraderie, “life isn’t about looking backwards; it’s about living forwards.”

In any other film, that might seem like the kind of cheesy bon mot that would go on a coaster or tea towel, but in Elliot’s assured and wonderfully insightful and empathetic hands, it feels real and true and something you can actually based a transformative change of life on.

Quite whether Gracie manages that must be left to the watching of this gorgeously immersive film which steals your heart and invades your soul in the very best of ways, and which won’t surrender its hold any time soon (spoiler alert: you most resolutely will not want it to; Memoir of a Snail is one for the ages) but suffice to say, the film refuses to let anyone stay in cages they shouldn’t be in, not if there is some form of escape waiting for them.

Animated with a joyful love of stopmotion and a witty exuberance that inserts rambunctious humour and hilariously out-there asides and life truths which will shock and delight and which feel like some of the most real things this reviewer has seen in a film for some time, Memoir of a Snail is a love letter to the power of hope and optimism to free you from the cages you form around yourself.

It doesn’t for a second pretend finding your freedom will be easy, nor that life’s darker edges will release from their existentially necrotic grip easily, if at all, but it does hold up the power of love, belonging and connection, profound meaningful, soul-stirring connection, to change worlds and lives, even when everything says that the kind of change that people like Gracie need and want, is impossible to find or hold on.

Memoir of a Snail argues with gleeful playfulness, a queer sensibility (the mainstream is, happily, not the driving force in this story though is darkly tries to make its presence felt) and seriously sobering intent in equal measure, brought to life by handmade animation that will seamlessly delight you at every single turn, that you can find release from your prison, no matter how safe it might first appear, and that life, to all outward appearances, might still have some very good things in store.

If you want your heart stomped on and then lifted up high, your spirit sobered up before it soars higher than you think it’s capable of, and you want to see stopmotion animation of the highest calibre and filled with the most pressingly truthful humanity, then run to see Memoir of a Snail which is likely one of the most beautiful and confronting things you will see all year, if not your entire lifetime.

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