A crackpot tangle of digital effects and Freudian fantasy
Welcome to Marwen 12A cert, 116 min ★★★★★
Dir Robert Zemeckis Starring Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Merritt Wever, Janelle Monáe, Eiza González, Gwendoline Christie, Diane Kruger
Robert Zemeckis’s new film could reasonably be described as a “big swing”, but what it’s swinging for I couldn’t hope to tell you. The Back to the Future and Forrest Gump director has made a sentimentalised portrait of the American artist Mark Hogancamp, who built a Second World War-era model village in his garden, in which he staged and photographed intricate military dioramas, while recovering from an amnesia-inducing homophobic attack.
Welcome to Marwen uses the peculiar nature of Hogancamp’s art as the pretext for a two-tier tale of triumph over adversity. In the real world, Mark (Steve Carell) is a beleaguered oddball rebuilding his life, while in Marwen, his pocket-sized alter ego, Captain Hogie, takes down regiments of action-figure Nazis with the help of the town’s inhabitants: a hit squad of buxom Barbies dressed in pin-up outfits. The miniature scenes are brought to life using the kind of performance-capture techniques Zemeckis pioneered in The Polar Express, with an uncanny valley effect that this time is wholly intentional: the characters look like living dolls because that is exactly what they are, setting their tiny black-and-white moral universe to rights while Mark looks on wistfully through the lens of his camera.
To give Welcome to Marwen its due, the transitions between these two worlds, often achieved in a single swooping camera movement, are carried off with Zemeckis’s trademark technical innovation and wit. But there is a constant confusion over how model-like the models are supposed to be: since they’re often animated with a very human fluidity, their more toylike movements read as freakish rather than cute, such as the scene in which Captain Hogie rotates his head through 180 degrees, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
Perhaps the film should have embraced that. There is something inherently unnerving, and perhaps even a little Lynch-like, in bringing a broken man’s inner world to life with digital effects. And the models themselves are a Freudian bunch. But in order to give Mark’s recovery a comprehensible dramatic shape, Zemeckis and his co-writer Caroline Thompson impose on it two very conventional story arcs: an impending court date for which Mark needs to pluck up the courage to face his assailants in person, and a flirtation with a pretty new neighbour called Nicol (Leslie Mann) – an idealised, scaled-down version of whom also crops up in Marwen, as Hogie’s latest love interest.
The result is a self-defeating, yikes-a-minute hodgepodge – such a crackpot tangle that it is even hard to fathom what a successful version might have looked like: The Truman Show crossed with Ant-man? Frida meets Small Soldiers? I have no idea. I wonder if anyone did.