Film reviews: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On | Sharper

The Bafta and Oscar-nominated Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a reminder that family friendly animation doesn’t have to be stuffed to bursting point with epic set-pieces, eye-popping visuals and ever-escalating emotional stakes to engage an audience. It can be as gentle and unassuming as a mock documentary about a tiny mollusc shell with one disproportionally big eye and his own footwear rattling around a house philosophising in adorable ways about his miniature existence to the lonely filmmaker he’s found himself living with. Expanded from a hybrid stop-motion/live-action short that director Dean Fleischer Camp and Marcel voice and co-creator Jenny Slate posted on YouTube back in 2010 (it subsequently spawned several follow-ups and a series of kids’ books), the film delights in depicting the minutia of its title character’s little life.

He’s a half-glass-full kind of guy, revelling in the wonder he finds all around him. But he yearns for connection most of all, having lost almost everyone that was important to him after the human owners of his house broke up and inadvertently packed up his family with their belongings. Only his grandmother, Nanna Connie (beautifully voiced by Isabella Rossellini), remains with Marcel in the house, which is now an Airbnb and currently occupied by the aforementioned filmmaker. Played by Fleischer Camp himself and also called Dean, he’s a recent casualty of a break-up too and is using his documentary about Marcel to avoiding dealing with his own feelings of isolation, something Marcel calls him out on. When Dean posts segments of his film online, it of course goes viral (just like the original short film did), and Marcel — who loves the attention — tries to use his newfound fame to track down his lost family.

A slyly funny commentary on the fickle nature of fame duly follows, though really the film is a delicately rendered parable about the need for genuine community — an accessible-to-all-ages meditation, if you will, on what we’ve all experienced to some degree over the last three years with the pandemic. The film isn’t heavy handed about this; the meta film-within-a-film adds a nice little distancing device, one that amusingly riffs on its own creation. But the the real key to its success is Slate’s characterisation of Marcel. Wonderfully sweet, funny and gently ironic, Marcel never sounds cloying or twee; the melancholy notes in her performance instead tease out the fragility of this inch-tall coil of unshakable optimism in recognisably human ways. It’s like nothing else out there.

Sharper begins with a definition of its title. “Noun,” it reads. “One who lives by their wits.” Look up an actual dictionary, though, and the definition is less euphemistic: it means swindler or cheat. Fudging reality right out of the gate is to be expected in a con movie, though, and for much of its running time this slickly directed, classily cast New York crime caper tries with varying degrees of success to present itself as character drama to distract from the fact we’re being had at every turn.

Structured as a series of interlinked chapters, each named for one of the main characters, the film — which stars Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Briana Middleton and Justice Smith — kicks off like a swooning Manhattan romance as young bibliophiles Tom (Smith) and Sandra (Middleton) meet in Tom’s antiquarian bookshop and promptly fall in love. As nobody is quite who they say they are in a con movie (or in the early days of a relationship — a fact the film slyly exploits), the film gradually reveals their nascent courtship not just to be fraudulent, but part of a larger puzzle box of schemes involving a volatile grifter called Max (Stan), a Manhattan socialite called Madeline (Stone) and an ailing billionaire called Richard (John Lithgow), whose contested fortune is the real driving force of the plot.

Submitting to the idea of being taken for a ride while trying to figure out who’s conning who is part of the fun of a movie like this and Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka’s screenplay offers plenty of bluffs and double-bluffs for the actors to sink their teeth into. At the same time, it’s all fairly transparent and while Brit director Benjamin Caron brings a lot of visual panache to the film, the final con is so obvious (and then needlessly over-explained) it undermines the rest of the movie.

Set in Naples, Italian director Mario Martone’s new film Nostalgia puts an intriguing spin on the city’s tarnished reputation as a hotbed of criminality by examining it through the homesick eyes of someone returning for the first time in four decades. That someone is Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino). Back to see his elderly mother (a moving Aurora Quattrocchi), Felice finds himself unexpectedly entranced by the city he left as a 15-year-old to build a new life in Egypt. Wandering its streets, every step unlocks another memory and intensifies his yearning for a life he never got to live, something Martone evokes with Super 8 flash cuts to Felice’s teenage years. But as Felice makes plans to put down roots again, the reason for his absence starts bubbling to the surface and his trip down memory lane becomes a reminder of a past the local crime boss (Tommaso Ragno) would rather stay buried. What emerges is a quietly gripping, brilliantly acted portrait of the ruinous grip nostalgia can exert when it clashes with the way things actually are.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is on general release; Sharper is on selected release and streaming on AppleTV+; Nostalgia is on selected release and available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema

Film reviews: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On | Sharper | Nostalgia