We need to have a moratorium on movie protagonists named Grace. To be clear, I have nothing against that name per se. It’s a perfectly lovely name in real life, and it also happens to be the name of my favorite restaurant in Fort Worth. When it’s the name of a main character, though, I just brace myself for some heavy-handed parable like A Fall From Grace, Grace Is Gone, and Grace Unplugged. Some movies as different as Short Term 12 and Ready or Not have been really good with heroines named Grace. To the latter list you can add Memoir of a Snail, which opens in North Texas this weekend.
It has to be animated, because the story based on the filmmaker’s own life might be unbearably sad if not for the animation. The anticlimactically named Grace Pudel (voiced by Charlotte Belsey as a girl and Sarah Snook as an adult) is a girl with a surgically repaired cleft palate growing up in Melbourne in the 1970s. Her mother dies giving birth to her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Mason Litsos and Kodi Smit-McPhee), then their French father (voiced by Dominique Pinon) becomes a paraplegic and an alcoholic after a car accident. When he dies, the siblings are sent to opposite ends of the country, with Grace being adopted by swingers in Canberra. Gilbert’s letters remind her that it could be worse, since he’s with Christian fundamentalists in Perth who speak in tongues and think anything fun is the work of Satan. All this is narrated in the present day by a grown-up Grace, who has just watched her grandmotherly guardian Pinky (voiced by Jacki Weaver) die. The old woman’s last words are, “The potatoes!”
The characters here don’t look much like Nick Park’s, but the stop-motion style will remind you a great deal of the Wallace & Gromit films, with streaks visible in the moving clay. Gilbert’s adoptive mother (voiced by Magda Szubanski) is an especially Park-like villain during her self-righteous tantrums at his latest spot of trouble. The main difference from Park’s films is that this is very much not for kids, as Elliott gives us sidebars on Pinky’s wild past and a homeless man (voiced by Eric Bana) who was a judge before he was caught masturbating during court proceedings. Grace’s mindset in the unglamorous Australian capital is reflected in the color palette — you haven’t seen this much beige outside of a Roy Andersson movie. Without an outlet for her creative endeavors, Grace becomes obsessed with snails, collecting the animals and all sorts of memorabilia related to them to form a carapace for herself.
Snook reads the narration in impeccably cool tones, as opposed to the few moments in the story when Grace cries out in anguish as to what all this pointless suffering is for. She marries two husbands (voiced by Tony Armstrong and Nick Cave), only for one to be revealed as unworthy of her and the other to die immediately after the marriage, and the news of Gilbert’s death is relayed via a callous letter from his adoptive mother that depicts his demise as God’s triumph over the abomination of homosexuality. The flat tone and dry humor seem like a thin veneer over a heart of bleakest pessimism until a story development near the end that makes the whole movie seem kissed by, uh, grace. Animation enthusiasts should turn out for Memoir of a Snail, but it has enough to move the hearts of the rest of us.
Memoir of a Snail
Voices by Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jacki Weaver. Written and directed by Adam Elliott. Rated R.
