What about the cinema and “60 Minutes” lately? The Netflix prison drama “Spiderhead” has a pretty funny joke about some of the show’s most famous pen pals and who among them died. Now “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” is coming, with another of the show’s correspondents, this one very much alive, appearing as herself. It’s quite strange. What’s even weirder: it’s far from the weirdest thing about this often charming and proudly peculiar film.
The main character is a mollusk. An inch tall, his name is Marcel and, yes, wears shoes. Jenny Slate provides her adorable little child voice. She and the director, Dean Fleischer-Camp (Slate’s ex-husband), wrote the screenplay with Elisabeth Holm and Nick Paley. Fleischer-Camp also appears in the film, playing himself, of sorts.
“Marcel” was born from a stop motion short film, released in 2010, and two others, posted on YouTube, in 2011 and 2014. The feature film combines stop motion and live action. It’s definitely one of a kind, like a children’s story crossed with a very self-aware internet home movie.
Dean, voiced by Fleischer-Camp, is a documentary filmmaker recovering from a bad breakup. The Airbnb he rents is the house that Marcel and his grandmother, Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) lived in. Dean makes a documentary about Marcel which he puts online. Marcel caused a sensation, with 22 million followers. Her stardom passes through mainstream media (thought the “60 Minutes” reference was just a goof?), and that stardom leads to a happy reunion, the nature of which this review won’t spoil.
Part of “Marcel” is quite funny. Some of them are touching. Some of them feel a little twee, or more than a little. All of this is observed up close, and these observations are used very imaginatively in various transpositions and workarounds for molluscs.
Marcel sleeps between two slices of bread. He moves around the house inside a tennis ball, which he calls “the rover”. His safe place is a sock drawer. A piece of stuffed animal is a pet. A glass table is “the ice rink”. An LP on a turntable is like a tilt-a-whirl mollusk that’s all whirl and no tilt.
Marcel uses a magnifying glass to pop some popcorn. He puts honey on the soles of his shoes when he wants to climb walls. As impressive as his ingenuity is, he can’t pronounce Wayne Gretzky’s name. He is prone to motion sickness.
Connie is no slouch either. “She’s not from here,” Marcel explains to Dean. “It comes from the garage. She traveled here through her coat pocket when she was very young. Connie uses the metal cage of a champagne bottle (the metal thing that holds the cork down before popping it) as a walker. She is even a fan of Philip Larkin, or at least she quotes his poem “Trees.” It’s a safe bet that Larkin didn’t think much of molluscs, with shoes or otherwise. Let’s hope Glenn Frey did: Marcel sings the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” (Did I mention twee-ness?).
So “Marcel” is nice, it’s charming, it’s clever. It’s also about as long as 89 minutes you’re likely to spend in a movie theater this summer. Shoes Marcel a. The narrative drive of his eponymous film does not. Here, in fact, is the strangest thing about this strange little film: that it manages to combine boredom and enchantment at the same time.
★★½
MARCEL LA COQUILLE WITH SHOES
Directed by: Dean Fleischer-Camp. Written by Fleischer-Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Nick Paley and Jenny Slate. With: Slate, Fleischer-Camp, Isabella Rossellini, Lesley Stahl. At Boston Common, Coolidge Corner. 89 minutes. PG (suggestive material, thematic elements).
Mark Feeney can be contacted at [email protected].
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