A prominent physical feature of the main character in Memoir of a Snail—a lonely woman named Grace who recounts her life story to a nonplussed garden snail—is her cleft lip (her “floppy lip,” as Grace calls it). I can’t imagine an art form more fitted to depicting this than claymation (stop-motion clay animation), which is what writer-director Adam Elliot employs for his film. There’s a fleshiness to the material that you can almost feel, as if you were stroking your own face. A target for bullies when she was a child, Grace’s lip sets the stage for a difficult life: the painful death of both parents, at different intervals; a separation from her beloved twin brother; and an uncertain foster home. Given the smudgy aesthetic of Elliot’s sets—gray buildings, dim rooms, beige skies—the dourness would seem to be too much for one person to bear. But Grace—voiced with quiet persistence by Sarah Snook of HBO’s Succession—carries on, eventually finding a place in the world while working in a library and a friendship with an older woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver). A hilarious montage of Pinky’s life—she was once on intimate terms with Fidel Castro—lightens Memoir of a Snail, but the movie mostly lingers as a sad, if truthful, account of a quietly desperate existence. “I held my own hand,” Grace remembers about a particular low point. In its narrative and animated aesthetic, Memoir of a Snail honestly honors low moments in life like that.
(10/19/24)
