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.
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