Welcome to Marwen
Robert Zemeckis (2018)
I watched Welcome in Marwen alone at Curzon Victoria. It was a lunchtime show but the empty theatre was eloquent. Robert Zemeckis’s film, starring Steve Carell, has already flopped in North America, resulting in ‘projected losses for the studio running as much as $60 million’ (Wikipedia). Curzon Victoria was one of around forty London cinemas showing the picture during the first week of its UK release. That total has dropped to two (not including Curzon Victoria) in the second week.
I nearly didn’t see the picture. Although I like Steve Carell, the taste he seems to be developing for solemn-sentimental roles that underuse his comic gifts is worrying. Last year’s Last Flag Flying is one example; I feared this might be another. (I’m guessing Beautiful Boy, which opens in Britain later this month, will be a third.) This is a rare example of a film I opted for on the strength of reviews. Most of these have been bad – the current Rotten Tomatoes fresh percentage is 29% – but some notable critics, including Richard Brody and Nick Pinkerton, are among the minority of positive voices. I didn’t read their (or any other) reviews beforehand but endorsements from two such different critical temperaments made me curious enough to buy a ticket. I now understand why Welcome to Marwen has bombed and I can’t share Brody’s or Pinkerton’s enthusiasm (the latter’s especially). But I’m glad I saw it and grateful to them that I did.
The film is based on the true story of Mark Hogancamp (already the subject of Marwencol, a 2010 documentary by Jeff Malmberg). In 2000, Hogancamp, a talented illustrator, was the victim of a savage attack by five other men at a bar in Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and a further forty in hospital. The brain damage he suffered largely destroyed his memory: he could remember facts and figures but virtually nothing of his previous experiences or relationships. As a kind of DIY rehabilitation, he built a miniature town – a Belgian town during World War II – populated with dolls, toy vehicles etc purchased from a local model shop. As a result of nerve damage to his hands, Hogencamp could no longer draw and took to photography instead. His subjects were the residents of his Belgian town, including the occupying German forces. He named the place Marwencol. (In Welcome to Marwen, the ‘col’ gets added at the end of the story – for reasons explained below.)
The climax to Zemeckis’s drama, with a screenplay by the director and Caroline Thompson, takes place at a public exhibition of Mark Hogancamp’s photography (on the same day that his five attackers are sentenced in court – the coincidence surely another departure from the facts). Until then, we see rather little of the photographs. We see a lot more – this being a motion picture – of animated fantasies of Marwen, supposedly taking place in Mark’s mind. The war hero Cap’n Hogie is his Marwen alter ego. Hogie is assisted in overcoming the Nazis not by other US soldiers but by a motley collection of women, each representing someone from Mark’s own life. The various dolls are voiced by, and have the CGI-ised faces of, the actors playing the characters in question. In the animated sequence that opens the film, Cap’n Hogie’s plane makes a crash landing and, while he survives, his shoes don’t. Hogie comes upon a pair of women’s high heels, puts them on and is wearing them when he’s confronted by a group of German soldiers. Their hostility and derision are intensified by his surprising footwear. It’s not long into the real-world narrative that we learn the circumstances of the attack on Mark Hogancamp at the bar. He was drunk and sounding off about his penchant for wearing women’s shoes. The five men who nearly killed him hadn’t liked what they heard.
The stop-motion animated sequences are, almost needless to say, Welcome to Marwen’s standout feature. They’re its most problematic feature too, chiefly because rendering them as Zemeckis and his team have done gives these sequences, at least for a viewer who watches animated films as rarely as I do, a Hollywood familiarity. For those who see and know more about animation, and are better equipped to appreciate the technical distinctiveness on display here, this may be less of an issue. But even if the techniques used to realise Marwen are innovative, the dynamics and the personnel involved are not. At one point, Mark is asked why he chose a World War II setting for the world he’s created. He replies to the effect that it’s nice to think of a war in which the US were the good guys. This rings true enough; the trouble is that realising Marwen in screen action connects it, and nostalgically, to a broader tradition of war movies and the American military heroism they illustrate. Beyond the repeated vanquishing of a sneering Nazi menace, there are associations too with other, more recent cinema. Hogie’s retinue of helpmates may have the physique of Barbie dolls but their attitude has a whiff of the kickass heroines of animated film hits of the last few years. None of these elements conveys, as they’re presumably meant to do, the highly individual imagination of Mark Hogancamp.
I was predisposed to expect the director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, three Back to the Future movies, Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump to major on special effects and skimp on emotional complexity; Welcome to Marwen did little to disabuse me of this idea of Zemeckis’s priorities. The balance of screen time between animated and live action sequences shifts in the course of the film (very occasionally, in Mark’s nightmare moments, they share the screen). The first Cap’n Hogie episode is extended to disorienting effect; nothing wrong with that but it proves not to be a foretaste of challenging storytelling. Mark falls for his lovely, kindly new neighbour Nicol (Leslie Mann) and is seemingly oblivious to the feelings the no less kind Roberta (Merritt Wever), who works in the model shop, has for him. (Richard Brody says the relationships with both women are fictional.) It’s almost refreshing that the narrative foregoes description of an attack victim’s slow, heartwarming relearning of how to speak and move but Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson gradually lose confidence in eschewing comforting explanation and resolution. When Mark first goes to court, he’s terrified by the swastika tattoo on the arm of one of the men in the dock: Zemeckis seems to want to assure us there’s a sound reason for Mark’s visualising his assailants as Nazis. In order to deliver an upbeat ending, the hero suddenly realises, like so many movie heroes before him, the root of his problems and, by an effort of will, instantly solves them.
This happens when Mark perceives the true nature of the femme fatale-ish ‘Belgian witch’ Deja Thoris (Diane Kruger), the one Marwen woman who doesn’t have an actual female counterpart. She represents, rather, Mark’s addiction to prescription medication and prevents him from getting close to real women. When Cap’n Hogie realises that Deja is a Nazi spy, Mark sees that the pills he thought were helping him are in fact a hindrance to his route back to normal life. He washes his tablets down the sink, returns to court to deliver a powerful victim impact statement, attends the opening of his photographic exhibition and invites the loyal Roberta on a date. He can also accept that he misread Nicol’s friendship for something more romantic though her importance to him is confirmed in the new additional third syllable of his model town[1].
Though not in the Imelda Marcos league, Mark owns approaching three hundred pairs of women’s shoes. He tells Nicol that wearing them makes him feel closer to ‘the essence of women’. He’s too nice and pitiable for Nicol to explore his pedal transvestism (he has no desire to cross-dress above ankle level) but the combination of his fetish, his idea of feminine ‘essence’ and the role of women in Marwen is intriguing – especially since there’s no indication of what relationships Mark had before he was attacked. Whatever these may have been, Mark can’t remember them. One of the few memories he has of the attack itself – that Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand by Your Man’ was playing on the jukebox – connects plausibly with the fiercely loyal female support on which Cap’n Hogie depends. Yet the distaff side in Marwen is a big difficulty with the film: it’s not surprising that ‘Women of Marwen’, its working title, was changed. Whereas the look and personality of Hogie complement Mark’s, the only Marwen woman (apart from Deja Thoris) whose appearance registers individually is the CGI version of Janelle Monáe’s Julie – and it’s no coincidence that Julie, a social worker who befriended Mark during rehab, barely features in the real world parts of the film. In contrast, I hardly noticed Roberta, by some way the strongest female character in reality, in her Marwen scenes. Eiza González, who plays a co-worker at the bar where Mark does a few hours each week, doesn’t come through strongly in either his life or his fantasies. As his Russian caregiver, Gwendoline Christie makes more of an impression in a single scene. Her Marwen avatar, who doesn’t have even one-sixth of Christie’s height, is less easily identifiable.
Leslie Mann is a different problem. She’s a bit too doll-like as the real live Nicol – whether this results from Mark’s or Robert Zemeckis’s idealisation of the character is hard to tell. It’s one of several things that could reflect the mind of either the hero or the director. ‘Stand by Your Man’ is one of a succession of pop songs of which there are short excerpts, particularly in the early stages. Are these supposed to express what happens to come briefly into Mark’s head? If so, his thoughts are disappointingly apt and obvious – it seems more likely the choice of songs occurred to Zemeckis. The original score by Alan Silvestri has a similarly conventionalising effect. If the music’s plaintive sweetness is meant to be an emanation of Mark’s gentle good nature, it’s a falsification of him.
According to Richard Brody, Mark Hogancamp used Marwencol ‘to express his unslaked anger toward his attackers, and many of his photographs are candidly gory death-images of the Nazis whom he identified with them’. Robert Zemeckis, by sidelining the still photography in favour of largely ebullient live action, downplays this aspect of Hogancamp’s work. Zemeckis also wants to exploit Steve Carell’s talent for personifying innocence. To this extent, the star contributes to the film’s soft-heartedness but he also does well to convey the turbulent side of the man he’s playing – and more. Welcome to Marwen is unusual in a few ways: one of these is that, thanks no doubt to the protagonist’s amnesia, there aren’t enough flashbacks. When, late on, Mark recalls the moments immediately before the bar attack, you get a powerful sense of what you’ve been missing by not seeing him in his earlier life. Steve Carell expresses a good deal of eccentric personality in just these few seconds. He also makes the most of what comic opportunities come his way – and Leslie Mann is at her best in the more humorous moments between Mark and Nicol. Merritt Wever is excellent as Roberta. From the moment she appears, she grounds the film in reality as no other character does. An exchange between Roberta and Mark in the model shop – he keeps thwarting her attempts to get him to come to lunch, she keeps changing the menu in the vain hope of changing his mind – is touching and witty. I laughed aloud a couple of times during this scene. The laughs were distinctly audible in the emptiness of Curzon Victoria screen 5.
10 January 2019
[1] According to Wikipedia, Marwencol is a conflation of Hogancamp’s own forename, Wendy and Colleen, although there’s no explanation of the latter two. In the film, Wendy is the name of a woman who came to Mark’s aid when he was beaten up.