Snails can’t move backwards. The muscles in their foot can only wave in one direction. They could make long and gradual u-turns, I suppose, but they can’t reverse over the slime trails behind them, which they use for communicating with each other and finding their way back home. In that sense, these slow-motion gastropods are the living, oozing embodiment of what Søren Kierkegaard once wrote about the world as we experience it: “Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.” What a shame the father of existentialism is a hair too dead to hear those words cited at a crucial moment in Adam Elliot’s wise and wistful “Memoir of a Snail,” as Kierkegaard — so fascinated with the anxiety and despair of the human condition — would’ve admired the obsessive toil of stop-motion animation, particularly in the service of such a poignant tribute to the absurdism of our existence.
The latest and most uplifting chapter in Elliot’s “trilogy of trilogies” (a career-long claymation project set to comprise three shorts, three longer shorts, and three features, the first of which was 2009’s “Mary and Max”), “Memoir of a Snail” belongs to a stunted but endearing Australian hoarder who inherits her late mother’s love for Helix pomatia. Her name is Grace Pudel, she’s voiced with great delicacy by the actress Sarah Snook (often glum but never self-pitying), and she wasn’t always as alone as she appears at the start of this film, which finds her sitting in a dirty garden and relating her life story to her only remaining friend: A snail named after Sylvia Plath.
It’s a grim story whose radiant sweetness (and constant, low-simmering comedy) only avails itself to Grace in its telling. Grace’s world has been a dreary collage of white clay and gray skies from the day her mother died while bringing her into it, but there was a time when she felt safe in it — a time when she embraced the comforts of her various homes as shells instead of self-imposed cages, and treasured her mother’s snails as a way of keeping the past alive as opposed to a way of entombing herself in it (young Grace is voiced by Charlotte Belsey). The best years of all were the ones she got to share with her kind-hearted twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Mason Litsos, and then Kodi Smit-McPhee as he gets older), a budding pyromaniac who beat up all of the boys who made fun of his sister’s cleft lip and/or her penchant for wearing a homemade snail hat, complete with wiry eyeballs drooping in front of her as if dismayed by everything they’ve seen. (Grace describes Gilbert as “Holden Caulfield, James Dean, and Charlie Brown all rolled into one.)
That was when they still lived with their alcoholic father, a French-born animator who they adored in spite of his condition, and would clap awake from his drunken stupors with a taste of the applause he never got to enjoy from paying audiences (he’s voiced by Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, perfectly cast in a film that teases an “Amélie”-like joy from our singular quirks and foibles). That was when Gilbert was still determined to set everyone free, and Grace still felt like she could save people in her own childlike way.
One year she found a sleeping homeless man — a former judge who was disbarred for masturbating in court — and wrapped him in Christmas lights so that he could share in the holiday spirit. Like so many of the events in this movie, all of them strung together along the thread of Grace’s constant narration, it’s the kind of thing that would seem too cruel to be cute in real life, but is somehow redeemed here by the crudeness of Elliot’s clay, which loves its lumpy characters (there’s no trace of 3D printing here) and finds a wealth of mottled beauty in a world that often seems ugly by design.
“All things can be repaired,” someone says, “and our cracks celebrated.” And “Memoir of a Snail” — however morbid it can be — is a delightfully droll celebration of those cracks, as well as the lives we’re capable of living in spite of them. You can see it in Elliot’s slightly macabre aesthetic, which makes the film look like a depressive episode that’s been lit by a single ray of hope, and also in his penchant for dry comedy, which finds a measure of gallows humor in even the darkest of situations. That proves to be a genuine lifesaver after Grace and Gilbert’s father dies at the end of the first act, and the children are scattered into different foster homes on opposite sides of Australia, one to a couple of well-meaning swingers and the other to a family of hyper-religious apple farmers who speak in tongues and worship their own product as a symbol of God here on Earth.
But the film’s persevering spirit is best embodied by the eccentric old woman who dies in the opening shot, leaving Grace with some cryptic last words that she’ll only be able to understand after spilling her guts to Sylvia. Her name is Pinky, she’s a wildly eccentric old lady voiced by Jacki Weaver (born for this), and she once had sex with John Denver in a helicopter. Pinky credits coffee enemas for her longevity, but you get the sense that she’s a natural survivor, and the joie de vivre that she maintains into her 80s — even after losing two husbands to hilariously violent accidents — becomes a major source of inspiration for Grace after the two become friends and roommates.
Pinky is nothing less than Elliot’s artistic ethos distilled into its sweetest and most shriveled form: Despite everything, she refuses to see her life as a tragedy. Defined by what her creator has described as a “nourishing whimsy,” Pinky is sensitive enough to appreciate why Grace has turned to (or into?) her snails for comfort, but free and knowing enough to insist that “the worst cages are the ones we build for ourselves.” It’s a tender balance that Elena Kats-Chernin’s marvelous score is able to suffuse into every fiber of the modest yet palpably hand-crafted film around her, which is so forthright with its pain that you can’t help but accept the truth of its joy. Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but “Memoir of a Snail” makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now.
Grade: B+
“Memoir of a Snail” screened at Fantastic Fest 2024. IFC Films will release it in theaters on Friday, October 25.
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