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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
yeah i love venture bros. ha ha ha. good catch there.
mary and max i watched some time ago and only once so i don't recall every detail of who did what to whom ... but basically at the beginning i see them as these sweet people who through no fault of their own become marginalized and manage to form a bond. yet as the movie goes on and mary grows up i started to think "wow, these people are real assholes". in the end i hated mary, and rather than a "comedy" as the movie was billed (it had its funny moments for sure) i perceived it more as a tragedy of fuckups. maybe i misread something, but fuck'em.
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I guess you mean the chain of events that was kickstarted by Mary writing a thesis about the Asperger's Syndrome and using Max as her case study without his consent. Yeah, that was a dick move, but at no point did I ever get the impression that either of them were malicious in their intentions.
Mary was still a young and very ambitious woman at the time she did this. In her view - and probably her naivity, she thought she would help him and other people with Asperger's Syndrome around the world. She just wasn't able to grasp that wanting to help is often the polar opposite of actually helping someone. In her ambition, she went way over her head and hurt the one person she actually cared very much about. That of course in no way justifies what she did, but it sort of gives you a bit of clarity as to why she did it.
Max's reaction was totally understandable. He felt used and marginalized and exploited by the one person he was actually able to bond with. But at the end of the day, Mary was also just a person with "warts and all". She was very remorseful, as evidenced by probably one of the film's darkest turns - the "Que Sera"-scene. And Max taking his time to forgive her was very logical as well. After all, the people you care about the most are also the people who can hurt you the most Things just took a very unfortunate turn. The fact that both lived in different parts of the world in a time prior to the internet only complicated things further. In the end, Max did find it in his heart to forgive her though.
Yes, they did start out as just kind of sweet people and got more rough around the edges as the film progressed. But I personally don't see any inconsistancy there. I thought it was quite authentic. In human relationships someone's bound to make a mistake sooner or later and feelings are bound to get hurt. It's only human. And I found it quite endearing that these characters were able to overcome what split them apart initially. Friendships often go through highs and lows. I thought this was a pretty powerful depiction of that. The ending was still sad though.