Episode 5 Premiere Time and More. Kennedy Jr. Meet The Suspects. Death death deaaaaaathhhhh! Her best friend Pinky Jacki Weaver has just passed away, and Grace is looking back on her own life, narrating to her pet snail Sylvia — as in Plath — the story of who she is and where she came from and all the miserable things that happened to her.
It began in the womb for Grace. No, really. Cleft palate, premature, mother died in childbirth. When she nearly bled out during surgery to fix her lip, Gilbert donated his own blood to save her, thinking it would kill him to do so. Sweet kid. They grew up in a cruddy little apartment, but it was home. They read quietly together and Gilbert indulges his pyromania by blowing up massive piles of fireworks as Grace watches wide-eyed; he also heroically fights off her bullies.
As the guy wrote, so it goes. I sprinkled him into his jelly bean jar. Our Take: Somewhere in Memoir of a Snail is an empathetic portrait of a misfit woman we all can relate to in some way, whether we recognize a part of ourselves in her, or know someone like her.
Elliot struggles to nail the tone here — aiming for bittersweet black comedy is like landing a B on a postage stamp, and I think he snaps off one of the landing gears in the trying. His visual style is admirably weird, distinctive in its landfill-meets-sad-girl-goth found-item-sculpture aesthetic, all wobbly and uneven in its character design, and perfectly imperfect. Your response more often will be ha ha… ha?
Should we be laughing? Not a surprise for a movie called Memoir of a Snail. Where to Stream: Memoir of a Snail. More On: sarah snook. Click to copy.
