Marcel is a shell. He tells us so up front. “I also have shoes. And … a face,” he says. “But I have a lot of other great qualities as well.”
He lives in a big, human-size house with his grandmother, Nanna Connie, and they’re doing just fine. Connie gardens with the help of a bee or two. Marcel has rigged a contraption to shake the fruit tree outside, leading to a bounty of citrus sustenance. He cruises through the house in a tennis ball. He walks a piece of lint as if it was a dog. (Its name is Alan.)
But he misses the rest of his family.
The house used to be filled with them—his mom and dad, uncles and cousins, even some friendly nuts and uneaten cheese puffs that the shells embraced as their own. Marcel had no lack of company, and every Sunday night they’d gather to watch 60 Minutes.
Alas, the human owners of the house—a man and a woman–started fighting more and more, and that scared the shells. They’d gather in a sock drawer until the storm had passed. But then, one terrible day, the man moved out, taking his socks with him. And, as it turns out, he took most of the shells, too.
“It’s pretty much common knowledge that it takes at least 20 shells to make a community,” Marcel solemnly tells Dean, who’s staying in the house (now a vacation rental) and filming a documentary about Marcel. Marcel misses his family. He’s carved pictures of them on a back of a mirror, and he knows every cut and groove.
He’d love to see them again. More than almost anything.
But to find a handful of shells in this strange, broad world … that seems too much to hope for. So Marcel shakes his tree, walks his lint and tries to ignore that Nanna is growing more forgetful. That Nanna seems older and slower now. That maybe, not very long from now, Marcel might be all alone.
Marcel’s a tough little shell. But little shells can be broken. And the heart inside? It’s the most fragile part of all.
Marcel can be an insightful little shell. He understands, for instance, community better than many people do.
When Dean, the documentary maker, begins posting videos of Marcel to YouTube, Marcel becomes a phenomenon. And together, Marcel and Dean try to leverage the power of the internet in an effort to find Marcel’s family. But Marcel’s huge audience doesn’t show a lot of interest in helping: Influencers flock to the house to make funny videos of themselves on the front lawn. Commenters leave plenty of hearts and smiley emojis, but little real sympathy and no actual leads.
“It’s an audience,” Marcel tells Dean. “It’s not a community.”
So he concentrates on his community of two—caring for Nanna Connie as much as a small shell can. He frets over her health. And as it seems to fade, he grows increasingly protective of her. When 60 Minutes wants to do a story on Marcel—a story that just might lead to finding his family—Marcel refuses, worried how the camera crew might impact Connie.
But Connie knows that Marcel needs more—even though he’s scared of change, too. She encourages him to take a chance. “Don’t use me as an excuse not to live,” she tells him.
None. Even a funeral seems largely secular.
Online fans of Marcel sometimes call the shell a “she,” in part because he wears pink shoes. Marcel takes a bit of offense at that, noting that both his father and grandfather wore pink shoes as well.
We learn that Dean, the documentarian, recently got divorced and is looking for a new place to live.
Connie falls off a washing machine, which chips a hole in the top of her shell. Marcel puts a bandage over it, but he worries that the fall has accelerated Connie’s decline.
Dean’s dog, Arthur, doesn’t quite know what to do with the talking shells in his midst. He barks and sometimes attacks them—though Dean prevents any actual carnage.
Marcel has some horror stories about how some of his relatives met their ends (or near ends). For instance, one of his cousins fell asleep in a pocket one day. “That’s why I don’t like the saying, ‘Everything comes out in the wash.’ Because sometimes it doesn’t. Or sometimes it does. And they’re just, like, a completely different person.”
Marcel cruises around the house in a tennis ball, which sometimes smacks into walls.
We hear about nine misuses of God’s name and one use of the “d–n.” There’s a wee bit of name-calling.
We hear a reference to someone drinking “a little too much nectar.”
Marcel is prone to car sickness: He blurps out a bit of vomit frequently during a car ride with Dean. (“How many times a day do you throw up in your car?” Marcel asks.)
When Dean asks Marcel how he makes his rope, Marcel leads him to the tub drain and says that he’s sometimes found particularly thick hairs there. “We call them hardy hairs,” Marcel tells Dean. Dean laughs quite a bit of that, which Marcel doesn’t understand at all.
As Connie’s health gets worse, she pretends she’s getting better. It’s all done with a loving eye toward Marcel, of course. She encourages him to take chances and preparing him, even, to move on. But it’s also a lie, so it’s worth mentioning it here.
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, the character, came to the world’s attention back in 2010, when Dean Fleischer-Camp posted his first video to YouTube. That initial offering has since racked up more than 32 million views and has been joined by two more.
But Marcel has never let that stardom get to him. He’s always been a modest mollusk. And a thoughtful one, too.
As such, Marcel’s namesake movie fits the shell like his own pink shoe.
It’s not a perfect film: No film is. Given several misuses of God’s name and a bit of bathroom humor, families might pause just a bit before picking up this shell.
But like our titular character, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, the movie, has a lot of great qualities. Yes, it’s funny and silly—the sort of humor that triggers warm smiles more than guilty laughs.
Still, it’s more than that. Through Marcel’s one googly eye, we see what it means to find community and lose it; what it means to grieve; what it means, perhaps, to care. It can be gentle and wistful and, sometimes, beautiful—but it’s rarely sappy, thanks to the humor we find around every corner.
Marcel’s right about the important difference between audience and community. If and when we go to Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, we become part of the shell’s audience, no matter how close we might feel to the shell on screen.
But through his story, perhaps we’ll learn a bit more about our own non-shell communities—how important the we’s in our lives are to our I’s. And how we can laugh and grieve, live and love in its midst.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
