Memoir of a Snail is a stop-motion marvel bursting with imagination and emotion. Despite its enchanting animated form, however, Australian writer/director Adam Elliot’s latest is most certainly not for children, what with it delivering a litany of miseries, misfortunes, and other for-adults-only elements that makes it one of the year’s most unconventional releases.
Over the course of its 94 minutes, this unique film, now in theaters, features death, sex, nudity, profanity, cremation, pyromania, kleptomania, bullying, child abuse, alcoholism, drugging, conversion therapy, dementia, suicide, and religious fanaticism. No matter its hopeful closing notes, it’s a downer of epic proportions, its action encased in a shroud of loss, loneliness, and depression that’s at once bracing and taxing.
Setting its tone from the get-go, Memoir of a Snail opens with Elliot’s camera zooming out of the mouth of elderly Pinky (Jacki Weaver) as she takes her final, raspy deathbed gasps. This greatly saddens Grace (Sarah Snook), who sits on a bench beside Pinky’s garden (dubbed a Pity-Pit) and recounts the torturous path that led her to this sad moment.
Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) entered the world at the same time that their mother left it, dying in childbirth and leaving them to their father Percy (Dominique Pinon), a French stop-motion animation director and clownish busker who was crippled and confined to a wheelchair by a drunk driver.
Grace herself was born prematurely and with a cleft lip, and though doctors corrected it, she was teased by schoolyard bullies as a “Rabbit Face.” Luckily, she was defended by Gilbert, whose loyalty to his sister was as staunch as his fondness for fire—and dream of following in his dad’s footsteps by performing fire-breathing and magic—was intense.
Elliot’s film is largely told in flashback and narrated by Grace, thereby assuming her despondent perspective. Percy develops sleep apnea and a taste for liquor, and when he passes away, Grace and Gilbert are sent to separate foster homes.
For Grace, this means residing with Ian and Narelle (Paul Capsis), a pair of swingers who leave her alone to attend key parties and whose unclothed bodies are a recurring sight. This is still far preferable to Gilbert’s lot with a clan of Perth zealots who pray in gibberish, pressure the boy to shave his head, and force him to toil for little money in their apple orchard. The siblings’ estrangement is a persistent weight upon Grace’s shoulders, who believes that they are “two souls but one heart.” While they stay in touch by writing letters—and Gilbert promises to one day save enough money to trek across the country to reunite with her—Grace’s sorrow grows.
From an early age, Grace seeks comfort in snails, whose hard shells are protective and who never leave or hurt her, and she soon begins wearing a wool hat decorated with bent-wire antennas and ping-pong ball eyes.
A generous soul, Grace tries to help people whenever possible, as with a homeless boozehound (Eric Bana) whom she wraps in Christmas lights. Still, any glimmers of joy, such as an amusement park trip with Gilbert and Percy that peaks with a ride on the Big Dipper rollercoaster, are fleeting. Once she’s taken away from Gilbert, she gradually immerses herself in books—and begins working at the local library, where she meets Pinky—and becomes a “snail hoarder,” her increasingly cluttered room akin to a womb that shields her from life’s awfulness.
Elliot dramatizes his glum tale with a surplus of visual inventiveness, his stop-motion frame jam-packed with small, telling details and marked by big-eyed, round-faced characters that are attractively odd and expressive. Memoir of a Snail flows between memories and points-of-view—at times, Gilbert narrates his own foster-home ordeal—and the writer/director tethers his plot’s strands with gentle aesthetic flourishes that enhance its personality. His voice cast is similarly confident, led by Snook as the downbeat if indefatigable Grace, whose saga gets brighter only after a stretch of darkness that includes marriage to the charming and doting Ken (Tony Armstrong), who supports her with love, consideration, and plates of sausages, the last of which, it turns out, speak to his own kinky sexual fetish.
From Pinky’s lamentations about old age, to Grace’s retreat into isolation and despair, to Gilbert’s awful fate at the hands of his fanatical foster family, Memoir of a Snail piles on the trials and tribulations. Elliot accurately evokes the cruel, stifling oppressiveness of depression and the way it blots out any sunshine, epitomized by Grace musing, “Grief is a nothingness. Leaves a metallic taste in your mouth. Places stones in your stomach. Tears don’t flow; they’re too scared. I no longer believed in silver linings or glasses half full. My glass was shattered.” His film is, for the most part, a precisely rendered descent into a pit of longing, regret, bitterness, and self-recrimination.
Nonetheless, because Grace articulates both the specifics of her saga and her feelings, Memoir of a Snail is frequently on-the-nose. Elliot’s screenplay relays everything in a blunt fashion that recalls a children’s film, and yet because this affair is fundamentally for an older audience, that unsubtle, spell-it-all-out approach grates.
More wearisome, however, is the material’s monotony. Grace is beset by a seemingly unending series of unfortunate events, and at a certain juncture, it becomes overkill, especially once she receives news about Gilbert that rocks her world and—as seen in flashback—involves dastardly mistreatment, murder, and deception. Better is a passage dedicated to Pinky’s backstory as a twice-married adventurer whose curiosity, courage, and zest for life inspire Grace, although it’s not enough to mitigate the proceedings’ crushing gloom.
Regardless of its artistry, Memoir of a Snail is something of a drag. In its final passages, it attempts to flip its proverbial script by illustrating how small acts of kindness can go a long way, and that perseverance and optimism—and a bit of luck—are the keys to transforming one’s destiny. Yet if the film is, at its core, about escape, it’s so melancholy that it never quite manages to break out of its own, ahem, shell.
