WELCOME TO MARWEN.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Steve Carell as Hogancamp Leslie Mann as Nicol and Merritt Weaver as Roberta.

I must say at the outset that WELCOME TO MARWEN is one of the bravest movies of the year. I say “brave” because surely Robert Zemeckis could have predicted the critical roasting and the box office disaster it has incurred. But he made it anyway. And he doesn’t flinch from what is, which is, admittedly, pretty creepy material.

Mark Hogancamp has found a way to cope with the trauma of a brutal beating he suffered in a bar. Damaged not only in body but in mind, he spends his time hiding from the world and indulging in building the miniature, table-top world of Marwen, a fictitious town in Belgium during World War II. He’s designated a World War II time frame, he says, because “That’s when we knew who the Good Guys were.” His miniature alter ego is “Captain Hogie,” who engages in ongoing battles with Nazis with the assistance of a group of warrior women.

They are all dolls.

Now what happens in this story is what really happened to the real-life Mark Hogankamp during his struggles with PTSD. And he really did build a miniature town populated by dolls. A documentary was made about his experiences, called Welcome to Marwencol.

Meanwhile, in the Zemeckis movie, Mark is struggling with loneliness. He can only get close to the Marwen world; and even there his inability to connect with people is echoed by his aversion to contact with, yes, dolls. Yes, even in Marwen he has his share of problems. Which is maybe the most interesting thing about this whole fantasy movie. If he can only summon up his courage to go the court proceeding that will put away the thugs who beat him up... Maybe that will bring some healing. Standing in his way, however—if a doll can really said to stand—is his wicked nemesis, a green-haired doll who pulverizes anything or any rival doll who invades his life and might bring healing to his condition.

That doll is named “Dejah Thoris.” After recovering from the shock of hearing the name of the John Carter’s Princess appropriated to this demon figures, I settled back and tried to figure out what was going on in this, certainly the oddest—and as I said, the bravest—movie of the year.

Director Zemeckis is obviously attracted, perhaps obsessed with the intersections of Mark’s doll world with Mark’s real world. They shift back and forth, and at times they merge in a seamless union. Which, of course, is Mark’s problem. And Zemeckis’s technical challenge.

Did I mention that Mark is fixated on high-heeled shoes...? Particularly, stiletto heels, which, he admits, were not invented until 1954, years after his imaginary time frame of Marwen.

And director Zemeckis doesn’t back off from this, either, disturbing as it might be to some. I did wince, however, when Zemeckis couldn’t resist inserting some cameo references to his trilogy, Back to the Future, and to the fairy tale of Cinderella (and in the latter, Cinderella’s silver slipper becomes a stiletto heel).

All the time I’m watching, I kept thinking of another documentary about a real-life casualty of life and conflict. That movie came out in 2004 and was called The Realms of the Unreal. It was about another lonely man lost in his fantasy world, named Henry Darger, who populated his one-room Chicago apartment with thousands of pages of typescript and hundreds of drawings chronicling a cosmic battle involving own cadre of battling females, the “Vivian Girls,” and the “Glandeco-Angelinnian” slave rebellion.

Both of these men, Mark Hogankamp and Henry Darger sought and found themselves in their own fantasy worlds. It gave them great consolation and resulted in great cost, both personal and psychological, to them. But to the extent that they wielded powerful imaginations. . . let them be honored for that.

And let there be at least a tip of the hat to Robert Zemeckis, even as his movie goes down in critical and box office flames.

THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.

Directed by Sara Colangelo. Starring Maggie Gyllanhaal.

HOMEWORK AFTER HOURS
I must confess a film with a title like THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER might not have attracted me had it not been for the presence of Maggie Gyllanhaal. Since she is known for her brave performances in rather eccentric roles, so I gave this a look.

The rewards, for me at least, were many—not the least of which is her performance of a woman’s descent into madness... Never has a destructive obsession been so quietly, even tenderly observed.

At first, we see Lisa Spinelli as a quiet and caring teacher, patiently teaching her young charges their alphabets, playing them classical music during rest periods, and always attentive to their playground games. One day she overhears young five-year old Jimmy (Parker Sevak) reciting words that seem to be some kind of poem. She writes the words down. They are disarming in their unselfconscious simplicity. While Lisa is not a poet herself—her poor attempts in a night class she is taking elicit only polite interest from her teacher—she is sensitive enough to realize she has a young, even precocious talent on her hands.

Lisa decides to recite those lines to her night class. The praise from teacher and students is immediate and enthusiastic. Gratified, she claims them as her own. Eagerly, she waits for the little boy to produce another set of lines. Again, she writes them down, and again she recites them to the applause of her writing class.

She begins taking the little boy out of the classroom at times, into the bathroom, out to the playground, in search of a quiet space where he can tell her more of his poems. She never raises her voice. She is always quiet and tender. But it is obvious she needs something from him. And it is apparent that her mentoring is becoming manipulative. She is, in short, dangerous. She contacts his parents, pressing them to encourage his talent. Too often, she says, the world stamps out such promise. Jimmy is like a young Mozart, who must be allowed to realize his gifts. She is right about that, of course. But she decides she is the one to nurture him. At all costs.

Things are going downhill with Lisa. Soon, she is calling Jimmy at home on the telephone. When her writing teacher finds out she has been passing the boy’s poems off as her own, he throws her out of the class. He attacks her for exploiting and preying off the work of others. The boy’s father grows alarmed and transfers him to another school. At home, Lisa’s family life is unraveling. They care nothing about the arts, she declares; they are only pathetic and common...

Packing her bags one day, she slips out of the house and follows Jimmy to the playground of his new school. Crouching outside the fence, she entices him to leave with her for a trip. Where are they going? He asks. She drives on.

We watch, considerably alarmed, as she takes him swimming into a nearby lake. She hugs him to herself as he bobs up and down in the breakers. She takes him to a hotel. She tells him they will go away together and publish a book of his poems. The boy, who has passively accepted all this, now realizes something is very wrong. He locks her into the bathroom and calls the police. From the other side of the locked door, Lisa is resigned to her defeat. She calmly issues instructions to help him call the police and give them their address. It’s as if she is watching herself doing all this, complicit in it, only mildly alarmed at her own behavior. There are no rants, no attacks. She is just a sad, sad woman, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, a hint of a bewildered smile on her lips. Out of her obsession to protect and nurture—all of it supposedly out of her passion for Art—she is destroyed and perhaps so is the boy.

The final scene is devastating. The police arrive. The boy is taken to the car and locked in. From inside, we hear his still, small voice: “I have a poem,” he says. “I have a poem.”

But now there is no one to hear him. No one to listen. His fragile genius will surely wither away in an indifferent world. Lisa has been right all along. But she is lost in the darkness of the final fade-out.