When we look back at movies and call them “overrated,” sometimes that’s because they came at just the right time—a time that has since passed. I say that to explain why, at the mid-point of 2022, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is one of my favorite films of the year. Yes, this is little more than a feature-length adaptation of a series of stop-motion shorts about the daily life of a talking shell with one googly eye and, well, shoes. Yet it’s made and offered with such a gentle, quiet spirit that the movie feels like a crucial oasis in a landscape dominated by cultural and political strife of all kinds. Sometimes we need a winsome little shell demonstrating how he rolls around the house inside a tennis ball, wishing no harm to anyone or anything—even an excitable dog—that might be in his way. The movie heightens the stakes a bit, revealing that Marcel and his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) were once part of a happy community of anthropomorphic items, until one day all the others disappeared. And so with the help of the largely offscreen documentary filmmaker (Dean Fleischer-Camp, also the director of the movie proper) who has rented Marcel’s house, the little shell begins to make videos for the Internet asking for help finding his friends. This leads to tiny adventures that nevertheless encompass an enormous sense of wonder, all expressed in the exquisitely squeaky vocal performance by Jenny Slate as Marcel (she created the shorts alongside Fleischer-Camp). Slate gives Marcel a bit of wit along with that gentleness (I love when he teases Dean), but it’s the openness of heart you hear in the voice that defines the character—without ever making him mawkish. In the film’s final moments (spoiler warning, I guess, though it’s not really related to the plot), Marcel shows us one of his favorite spots, a windowsill where a soft breeze flutters in. Standing there, curtains gently floating behind him, he describes the way hearing the wind echo through his shell makes him feel like he’s a small but crucial part of the world’s beauty. In a subtly audacious grace note, the film ends with that sound—a softer version of the noise that comes from blowing in a shell at the seashore. Would it be so bad if that was the only sound that came out our mouths for the rest of the year?
(7/6/2022)
