Supposedly writer/director Adam Elliot was once asked by a child why everybody dies in his films. He's supposed to have answered, "because that's what they do in real life". Welcome to animation, Australian-style.
WARNING - this review contains substantial spoilers. However I'd already heard virtually every one of them before I first watched it, and it didn't realy spoil it for me. Up to you, but part of the experience of this film seems to be knowing what happens, to a large extent, before you see it. In fact I put off watching 'Harvey' for months, and approached it with something of a sense of dread. In a sense I kind of feel it would spoil the film if you DIDN'T know a lot of what was coming. Anyway, on with the review.
Even a fragment of the synopsis of 'Harvey Krumpet' reads like an Edward Gorey story (in fact Gorey gave almost the same answer as to why everyone dies in his stories). Harvey is born in Poland in 1922. His mother is psychotic and has lead poisoning. He develops Tourette's Syndrome. Both his parents die in an accident. He moves to Australia as part of the great wave of postwar Eastern European immigration. When he gets here, he is repeatedly hospitalised after being bashed, and struck by lightning. He develops testicular cancer. His wife drops dead on his 65th birthday. He develops Alzheimer's and spends the rest of the film in a nursing home with other dementia patients, where he meets a pathetic old German woman with cancer of the goiter, who commits suicide (in the director's commentary, Elliot worries that this last scene was going to be 'too sentimental'.)
All of this is narrated by Geoffrey Rush in a voice which you could imagine being used for 'Thomas the Tank Engine'. Now if this were from just about any other place on earth, I could only imagine it being done as some kind of sick-humour designed to appeal to college students. In fact it is done utterly straight, neither playing for laughs or for pathos. It just is.
That's not to say there isn't humour in the film. Harvey at one pivotal stage experiences an epiphany in which he is told to 'seize the day'. This causes him to become a nudist and an animal liberationist, resulting in a scene late in the film where he takes another althzheimer's patient on an animal liberation raid. Shades of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?
The point I was trying to make early on, is that there is something very Australian about all this. A sort of existential atheism, which simply admits that there is no justice in the universe, no injustice either - just cause and effect, and that it is up to the individual to make the most of whatever hand they're dealt. Actually it reminds me strongly in this sense of another great Australian film, 'Bad Boy Bubby'.
If there is a moral to the story - and Elliot goes out of his way not to ram one down your throat - it's that no matter how bad things get, there is something worth living for, as Harvey shows us at the end of the movie - even if it's just sitting waiting for an imaginary bus which he knows will never arrive.
The last 'fakt' which is shown at the end of the film, is one of Elliot's own quotes.
'Life is like a cigarette. Smoke it to the butt.'
What could have been juvenile humour or unremitting gloom turns out to be something of a testament to the human spirit, and perhaps a plea to be yourself, even if you're a 'loser'. It's sad, there's no doubt of that, but it's funny too, and most of all it's dignified. I'm glad Elliot made this little film.
The director's commentary is worth listening to, as it contains loads of details of just what a painstaking process backyard claymation is. Did you know that Elliot's mother did all the knitting in the film - including the 1 cm high finger puppets? How do you animate rain on a window in stop-motion? What substance works best for snot? And never use icing sugar for snow, because the ants will get in it.
With films like this and 'Spirited Away' winning Academy Awards, and others like 'The Triplets of Belleville' being nominated, you have to have some hope that the future for popular animation might be just a bit more interesting.
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