Like a number of Irish people, Jenny Slate received good news on February 24th. The touching, hilarious full-length version of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, adapted from her short movies featuring a monocular seashell, was nominated for an Oscar in the best-animated feature category. The charmingly blithe character first emerged in 2010. Over the past decade, he built up a cult following before, in the current expanded version, landing to raves at the Telluride Film Festival. Perhaps Slate was already blase about the nomination. Everyone predicted it.
“Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever been blasé about one thing in my life,” she says with a nervous laugh. “No, I was very, very excited. Very excited. I am still excited. And I’m just going to keep that feeling going. I don’t think something like this will ever happen to me again. And so I’m just going to enjoy it.”
On reflection, I can believe that Slate is not at home to blase. A graduate of Columbia University, she honed her nervy, faintly neurotic persona in a one-woman show called Jenny Slate: Dead Millionaire. She did a year on Saturday Night Live. In 2014, she starred in the ground-breaking Obvious Child, a comedy structured around the protagonist’s abortion. Working with Dean Fleischer Camp, she continued to flesh out the strange world of Marcel.
There is no escaping the conclusion that the ambulatory shell speaks for his creator. Slate improvises all his dialogue and, though the character has the ingenuousness of a polite child, he does say things one can imagine coming out of her mouth. “If I was someone else I would really be enjoying this,” Marcel remarks on a pleasant day. Those sorts of things.
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“Yeah, I think there’s a lot of that,” she says. “I think that’s fairly accurate. Marcel is not a child. You don’t know how old he is. Sometimes he seems like a child because he’s never posturing. Children don’t know that that is a requirement of social beings. Children are so delightful because for a while they do as they please.”
I have heard her say that Marcel — despite being a tiny one-eyed object in sneakers — can deliver her thoughts without triggering the unconscious bias that challenges female performers.
“Yeah I think you nailed it,” she says. “I am playing not just a non-human character, but a character who is unlike any you have seen before. It’s not a dog. It’s not a deer. It’s not a bird. It’s this completely unique individual. Maybe there is an implicit bias due to that smallness.”
But that comes from a different direction.
“Yeah. I can place myself fully inside of his psyche. And I just focus on the pigment of the emotion. That is an incredible opportunity for a performer.”
There also seem to be near-explicit allusions to Slate’s biography in Marcel the Shell. Dean Fleischer Camp directs the mock documentary and stars — largely off camera — as a film-maker sheltering in an Airbnb following the collapse of his marriage. Early on he meets Marcel living with his equally shell-like grandmother (none other than Isabella Rossellini) and decides to help him locate the rest of his family. In the course of their conversations, “Dean” explains how he has remained on good terms with his former wife. Out there in the real world, Fleischer Camp was married to Slate from 2012 to 2016. The film is surely inviting us to draw the parallel.
“Yeah, our whole life is in there. It’s all peeking out,” she says. “It’s disguised in various ways. I think that that’s so important for us. I need to feel that everything I’m going through, even the grief, even some things that are ugly, even regret, even doubts, even moments of extreme joy — right now we’ve been nominated for an Oscar — is all in there. I don’t want to feel like this is a crazy high that I can’t hold on to. I don’t want to feel like my lows are so low I have to push them away.”
Articulate and amiable, but intense in a way you expect from educated Americans, Slate was raised among a Jewish family in the suburbs of Boston. After an Ivy League education, she could have taken any number of conventional routes to prosperity, but Slate seems to have been committed to the performing life from an early age. In 2000, still at Columbia, she met her first significant comedy partner Gabe Liedman.
“I wanted to be an actor ever since I can remember wanting anything,” she says. “But my parents were really strict about not becoming a professional actor until I had gotten a college degree.”
The spell at Saturday Night Live (SNL) does not seem to have been an unqualified success. Early on there was a very American sort of kerfuffle when she accidentally uttered the word “fucking” during a live broadcast. The supposedly anarchic comedy show airs at 11.30pm, but this was enough to trigger a serious news burp. “Saturday Night Live has started the season with a bang, or, more precisely, an F-bomb,” Associated Press reported. I note that there was no way such a thing would have registered in the UK or Ireland in 2009. The sketch played after midnight, for Pete’s sake.
“I am a student at heart,” she says. “I just like getting A’s. I would never do that to get attention. I didn’t mean to say it. But I also genuinely just do not … care. Truly, who cares? It is so dorky that anybody would care. I didn’t say a slur. I don’t think what happened was hurtful in any way. And nor do I think it was damaging. I think if I was a man nobody would have cared.”
Oh really?
“I think it would have been absorbed. They would think it was cool.”
That incident had no bearing on her parting ways with SNL at the end of her first season. She has said in other interviews that she and the show just did not “click”. But the termination still bristles a little. She had grown up watching tapes of Gilda Radner on SNL and admits that a place in the regular cast was an early ambition. But she felt that she wasn’t “well suited to the culture of it”.
“I felt that I just didn’t fit in,” she says. “It was incredibly heart-breaking to be fired. It’s a very clear and public rejection. Yeah. It’s very hard to be fired from something before you have even really gotten a chance to prove yourself. But I also think truly it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because I was not suited for that show. I don’t know what I am, but I just need a much bigger space around me. I like a longer process of creating art.”
Jenny Slate Sings “Landslide” As Marcel The Shellhttp://t.co/twWBqQcFn6 pic.twitter.com/97rF69thhE
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The process of bringing Marcel to the big screen has, indeed, taken over 10 years. I can understand why Slate, whose work deals in a class of militant delicacy, could settle on a persona like that of her tiny alter-ego. He quietens down some of her nagging anxieties into ambient humour. But nowhere in previous interviews have I read it explained how he became a one-eyed shell in cute shoes. It’s not an obvious physical expression of contemporary angst. It seemed he evolved first as a voice during improvisations with Fleischer Camp. Marcel was small. He was in a rush. He was harried. But he was not yet a shell.
“Dean interviewed me and when had enough audio, he decided to put together what the little thing was,” she says. “He had a bunch of found objects. He had some stuff from the craft store. He had stuff from the toy store. He started to glue eyes on to different things. There were a bunch of prototypes that were creepy. But then he put some modelling clay in the hole of a shell. And he put the eye in there and the two shoes on. It just looked so good.”
She claims they felt no fear of expanding the project into a feature. They were right to feel that way. Marcel is a critical hit that seems to encapsulate a very modern class of comic unease. Quite an achievement.
Slate pauses.
“What I want to do is make art and also live within a life that is offering up a hospitable environment for everything that might occur,” she says in her thoughtful way.
A sound approach.
- Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens on February 17th
