‘Welcome to Marwen’ is lump of coal under Christmas tree
“Welcome to Marwen” is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.
I hope I’m in the minority with this opinion. It’s a drag to respond poorly to the latest from director/cowriter Robert Zemeckis, who landed in my top 10 as recently as 2012 (for “Flight”). The Chicago native’s early progression from the exuberant flops “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (1978, one of next month’s Criterion Collection releases) and “Used Cars” (1980) to his first certifiable pop classic (“Back to the Future,” 1985) remains gratifying proof that a commercial filmmaker can hit it big without losing his way. Maybe Zemeckis’ particular solutions to the narrative challenges posed by “Welcome to Marwen” simply don’t feel satisfying or emotionally authentic to me.
All I can do is try to explain why.
The story behind “Welcome to Marwen” has been recounted, beautifully, by the 2010 documentary “Marwencol.” (That film’s director, Jeff Malmberg, served as an executive producer on the Zemeckis film.) In 2000, Kingston, N.Y., resident Mark Hogancamp was nearly killed in a brutal five-man assault. The beating left Hogancamp with a traumatic brain injury, severe impairments and virtually no memories of his life until that night.
Hogancamp sought refuge in a wholly invented world, built to his own specifications and filled with 12-inch-high plastic figures. This was “Marwencol,” Hogancamp’s fantasy Belgian town, and the site of various and variously therapeutic World War II scenarios involving his alter ego, Capt. Hogancamp; a powerful sorceress; a passel of sexy, available female warriors; and an onslaught of Nazis hellbent on the captain’s destruction.
Built carefully in his yard to 1:6 scale, Hogancamp’s Marwencol turned into an extended photo shoot, with Hogancamp capturing images of the imaginary town and its inhabitants. The results found their way to a Manhattan art gallery in 2006, and the rest is a peculiar and reassuring slice of “found” history, asserting the power of one imagination over some pretty awful circumstances.
There’s so much to this story: Hogancamp’s posttraumatic stress disorder, the hate crime that brought him to the edge of the abyss, the creative outlets by which he turned that suffering into something else. It’s clear why Zemeckis was compelled to attempt a big-screen dramatization of this defiantly small-scale universe.
Steve Carell plays Hogancamp and, in the extended motion-capture animation sequences, the studly captain. Roughly half the movie takes place in Marwen, as vignettes of combat, carousing, torture and romance are interlaced with real-world scenes. Screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Zemeckis freely fictionalize their version, so that Nicol, the friendly woman new to Hogancamp’s neighborhood, played by a warmly empathetic Leslie Mann, becomes an audience conduit. For Hogancamp, Nicol’s threatening exboyfriend (Neil Jackson) triggers memories of the homophobic thugs we see in flashback.
The foot-high women in Hogancamp’s Belgian enclave are played by Janelle Monae (G.I. Julie); Eiza Gonzalez (Caralala); Diane Kruger (as Deja Thoris, the Belgian witch); and others. Unsettling objects of desire, certainly, and Zemeckis knows it. We spend a lot of time with these figures, in Hogancamp’s alternate reality.
Marwen (here shortened from “Marwencol”) very quickly becomes the very thing “Welcome to Marwen” cannot overcome. The way Zemeckis shapes these stop-motion animation scenes, they’re meant to be exciting, funny, scary, a little of everything. But they whack the movie completely offkilter. We lose the strange, quiet intimacy of Hogancamp’s careful manipulation of this world. The real-life scenes don’t feel like Hogancamp’s real life; they feel like a Hollywood falsification of it, despite Carell’s and Mann’s valiant efforts.