Welcome to Marwen (2018)

In 2015 director Robert Zemeckis made The Walk, a feature film adapted from the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, about French highwire artist Philippe Petit's covertly implemented walking of a high wire between the twin towers of the then new World Trade Center in 1974. The Walk may well have been the veteran directors best movie since Cast Away back in 2000, so one can see the motivations behind adapting the 2010 documentary Marwencol (which I have not seen but hear is really good)  into his new feature Welcome to Marwen. It is seemingly the perfect kind of subject matter for Zemeckis, blending character portrait with special effects vehicle, however the translation process here seems not to have gone as smoothly as his earlier effort.

It is the story of one Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York. Hogancamp had been a talented artist specializing in World War II illustrations, however one night while drunk in a bar he let a group of the wrong people know about his fondness for wearing women's shoes. These men proceeded to beat Mark so severely that he was left comatose, and upon awaking had no memory of his previous life. Unable to draw with any skill anymore but still possessing creative impulses Hogancamp created a fake World War II era Belgian town in his yard, populated it with dolls he had altered, took pictures of them, and became a successful conceptual artist.

Now there are many things about Welcome to Marwen that work, the animated sequences with the dolls which represent people in Mark's life, well that is neat to look at. Steve Carell's performance as Hogancamp, solid and sympathetic. The structure of the movie, and many of the individual scenes work well. Leslie Mann is also quite good in this. The movie aims to be affirming and so many of the  people (principally women) in Mark's life are so very understanding and supportive, and that's great and I applaud that, but their is an elephant in the film that is never directly addressed and which caused the whole enterprise to feel off kilter and slightly irritating to me. Namely that Hogancamp, at least as here portrayed in the movie, is kind of a creep with major boundary issues. He does things in this film that if the film were not about him and from his perspective, well they'd creep you out and you'd want to stay away. Doubtless some of this is a result of the brain injury, but even before that Mark seems to have been something a different duck, and while I don't want to unfairly judge him, and there are many aspects to a person and we should try never to reduce anyone to their oddest quirk or most unappealing personality trait, he's kind of creepy. I just really wish this film would have dealt with that more head on, Mark still could have come off well on the aggregate, but not wanting to address his oddness directly felt odd to me, and precisely what the movie was trying to say, well it's muddled. The tone is sometimes all over the place, and mixture of kid friendly CGI with Mark watching a porno movie, well...

This probably wasn't the best format for his story, I suspect the documentary does a better job of rounding out the person, and even if it doesn't Hogancamp is likely best as an ambiguous character study, not as the protagonist of a self realization fantasy spectacle. The fact that Welcome to Marwen opened to the worst box office number of Zemeckis's career would tend to bear that out. However I have got to applaud the risk taking, an interesting failure. *1/2