Have to say, I saw the craziness of Welcome to Marwen coming. We’re long past the days where Robert Zemeckis is directing like he’s one of the great filmmakers of all time. Remember, he gave us Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Back to the Future, AND Forrest Gump, among other classics. Around Polar Express, Zemeckis was more interested in making cool technical stuff onscreen then putting in any time offscreen on, ya know, characters, the script, or a story people will care about.
Marwen is a fictional creation by an artist named Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell). Hogancamp used to be a painter until he was jumped by a gang of white nationalist Nazis, removing not only his memory of the incident, but his ability to paint, and leaving Mark with severe PTSD. His coping mechanism is Marwen, where he sees himself as Cap’n Hoagie, under attack in WWII from Nazis. In Marwen, the people coming to his aid are the women in his life, including Carlala (Eiza Gonzalez), Suzette (Leslie Zemeckis), Roberta (Merritt Wever), Anna (Gwendoline Christie), Wendy (Stefanie von Pfetten), GI Julie (Janelle Monae), and newcomer Nicol (Leslie Mann).
The technical thing Zemeckis was clearly attached to here is Mark’s inner monolgue and Marwen coming to life via these figurines. He gets to do some mildly cool stuff, like watching them die, and collapse like a plastic figure would. Or watch an arm sever, and then reattach like a toy. These scenes involve the best sight gag in the movie, where there’s a time machine that looks eerily similar to a grey car that may or may not have been used as a time machine before. However, there’s nothing particularly revelatory about the technical achievements Zemeckis does here; the best part of these scenes is that they distract you from the main story.
That’s because the main story varies between confusing, condescending, and extremely offputting. Zemeckis is credited as a writer on this film, but I’m pretty sure that means that he blanket approved whatever the real writer was giving him while he went off and did all his technical stuff in a dark room by himself, and he gave the real writer somewhere between 1 and 3 days to complete the entire script. The real Mark Hogancamp is a fascinating guy; he loves cross dressing, stopped drinking after his assault, and did transition from a painter to a photo artist. There’s a great character study in here somewhere, specifically about how someone who’s poor has to deal with PTSD. Instead, Welcome to Marwen focuses on…Mark’s drug addiction? His time in Marwen is spent fighting off Deja (Diane Kruger), a character who resembles the blue pills Mark takes everyday. However, the goal of the movie is to get Mark to testify in court that these Nazis jumped him because of a hate crime, which isn’t really ever made clear by the story. The cross dressing, I guess to appeal to mass audiences?, is changed to a shoe fetish, which Mark brings up over and over again with no one, not even newcomer Nicole, really asking more about it. The women only serve as objects of desire or inspiration for Mark, failing to become real characters because we’re off in fantasy land not coping with reality. Poor Merritt Wever and Leslie Mann have to fawn over this troubled man for no particular reason for the majority of time they are onscreen, ignoring the fact that all Mark talks about is Nazi’s, World War II, women’s shoes, his pornography interests, or his ex-wife Wendy. What a charmer!
I’m certain that Welcome to Marwen will be mocked at midnight screenings for years to come. I hope Robert Zemeckis realizes that his director career has hit rock bottom. He can then go forward and realize his true calling as a Special Effects consultant who makes good CGI movies better. Or maybe Robbie, baby, come back to Chicago for a hot minute and rediscover what made you so special before LA corrupted you. ;).