Welcome to Marwen
Robert Zemeckis’s career has always had some interesting twists and turns in it in terms of what he’s trying to do as a visual storyteller, and “Welcome to Marwen” fits neatly into that legacy. What it doesn’t do is tell its story in a neat, organized way that does it justice. That makes it probably the most disappointing film I’ve watched from the last part of 2018, but the film deserves some credit for not quite telling the story of Mark Hogancamp in a wholly predictable way.
Hogancamp is a real person, and his story has already been told in the documentary, “Marwencol,” which I’m now curious to see. I can understand completely why Zemeckis was drawn to his story. A former illustrator, with a fascination for WWII imagery, Hogancamp (played here by Steve Carell) had a good, eccentric life before one night, he was brutally attacked by five white supremacists, and nearly left for dead. He somehow survived, but every memory of his life is gone from his head, although he can make new memories. Now, he is surviving the PTSD the event lead to as best he can, and using dolls and photography to heal. When a woman (Leslie Mann) moves in across from him, his life, and perspective on the art he is creating, changes as his assailants are about to be sentenced.
Healing through art is a subject I love in films, and that was a big part of the pull towards Zemeckis’s film for me when I watched the trailers. I am an absolute sucker for movies that tug at the heartstrings like “Marwen” wants to. That said, I couldn’t get there with this film, and a big part of it is how Zemeckis approached the film. Always the technician, Zemeckis wants to bring us deeper into the world of Marwen, the fictional world he is photographing and creating through dolls and models, using performance capture animation to give the stories Mark is telling through his dolls a way into Mark’s inner feelings as he struggles with his PTSD, and the trauma of that night. This is a fantastic premise for someone like Zemeckis, but the problem is it feels hollow in his execution, and in the screenplay he co-writes with Caroline Thompson. You see, Mark has cast himself as a WWII army Captain fighting off the Nazis (read as his attackers in real life) during the war, and Cap’n Hogie has his women in Marwen whom come to his aide against them. All of the women are based on real women in his life- including a co-worker at the bar he works at (Eiza González); the vet who helped him in rehabilitation (Janelle Monáe); the caregiver who administers his meds (Gwendoline Christie); the woman who runs the hobby store (Merritt Wever); and even Mann’s character, Nicol, gets one. The problem is, with the exception of Nicol and Wever’s Roberta, we don’t really get to know these women beyond a surface glance, so we don’t get much indication on why they might be important to Mark. That lack of depth hurts the dramatic impact of what we’re watching, however well-staged and imagined it is by Zemeckis. Maybe a different approach would have made “Welcome to Marwen” come to life the way the director of “Forrest Gump,” “Back to the Future” and “Cast Away” wanted it to.
