Crusader for justice? You be the judge
therapy, Mark managed to teach himself to walk again. Dealing with the trauma required more extreme therapy. Mark created a doll-sized replica of a Belgian town called Marwencol during the Second World War. A cast of plastic figurines populated the town which Mark photographed in a series of gruesome tableaux.
An Action Man figure called Hogie was his avatar, five Nazi soldiers represented his attackers and Barbie dolls stood in for the women who had helped his recovery. The pictures formed the basis of an exhibition that made a victim into a respected artist. Zemeckis turns the photographs into animated action movies. A motion-captured Carell is reborn as grizzled Action Man Captain Hogie, protected from the Nazis by heavily armed and very scantily clad Barbies who look and sound like actresses Janelle Monáe, Merritt Wever, Eiza González, Leslie Mann and Diane Kruger.
The dialogue is peppered with one-liners and the action plays like a pastiche of the war movie, similar to Roger Rabbit spoofing 1940s film noir. But the subject matter is no laughing matter. Nobody tried to rape or torture Jessica Rabbit, which seems to be a daily threat for the Barbie inhabitants of Marwen.
In between, we get scenes of Carell’s live-action Mark fretting about attending the trial of his attackers, buying dolls from Roberta’s (Wever) craft store and obsessing over his new neighbour Nicol (Mann). Here Mark presents his photos in broadly feminist terms. In his head, he fetishises his female friends in plastic because “women are the saviours of the world”. But Carell’s Hogancamp makes this a very tough sell. We learn little about him except that he collects ladies’ footwear, watches porn (to add an extra dose of creepiness, Zemeckis’s wife plays Mark’s favourite porn star, Suzette), is obsessed with the Second World War and used to draw pictures of topless women.
For the film to pack an emotional punch we have to be on the lead character’s side. But when big-hearted Nicol knocks on his door, you want to tell her to run a mile.
THE PAINFULLY pretentious drama is not only available at the cinema but subscribers of Sky’s movie package can also suffer it at home.
Divided into “chapters”, it tells stories that intersect at a car accident. Antonio Banderas is the stepfather of a boy who witnesses the tragedy, Oscar Isaac is a grieving widower, Annette Bening his therapist and Olivia Cooke the victim’s daughter.
Writer-director Dan Fogelman wrote films for Disney and Pixar, and has come a long way from Fred Clause and dog animation Bolt. His eureka moment is revealed halfway through this meandering, time-jumping drama. Olivia Wilde’s student is writing an essay on “unreliable narrators” (think Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects) when she hits on what she sees as a new angle.
“Life itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator!” she shrieks to her boyfriend (Isaac). Fogelman’s idea is that we all lie to ourselves as we try to make ourselves the heroes of our own life stories.
The concept is baked into his stupid movie. We’re shown conflicting viewpoints and at times a mysterious narrator replays a scene to show the difference between what a character remembers and what they did.
Banderas’s section is best. He is so good as a troubled Andalusian olive farmer that Fogelman lets him get on with it. The other strands are wildly over-written. The narrator is only revealed at the long-awaited end. And she’s reliably irritating.
Life Itself