Wel­come to Marwen

Through­out his film­mak­ing career Robert Zemeck­is has repeat­ed­ly explored the world through the eyes of lone male fig­ures who exist, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, at a remove from real­i­ty. Think of Tom Han­ks in For­rest Gump and Cast Away, Joseph Gor­don-Levitt in The Walk and even Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rab­bit. Though super­fi­cial­ly dif­fer­ent these films all revolve around a cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist who is in some way iso­lat­ed or dis­con­nect­ed from every­one else.

Mark Hogan­camp is the lat­est addi­tion to Zemeck­is’ ros­ter of extra­or­di­nary every­man types. Played with trade­mark benign charm by Steve Carell, he’s a small­town restau­rant work­er who spends his free time immersed in a World War Two-era mod­el vil­lage in his back­yard, which he built fol­low­ing a hor­rif­ic assault that left him with par­tial brain dam­age and mem­o­ry loss. His is a sto­ry of courage, sur­vival and tri­umph over tragedy, though it is not quite as uplift­ing as it might have been.

Wel­come to Mar­wen is a loose drama­ti­sa­tion of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 doc­u­men­tary, Mar­wen­col, which is both a com­pelling por­trait of PTSD and a fas­ci­nat­ing study of the ther­a­peu­tic and trans­for­ma­tive pow­er of art. Zemeck­is is evi­dent­ly less inter­est­ed in the specifics of how and why Hogan­camp came to cre­ate this aston­ish­ing­ly detailed dio­ra­ma, instead divid­ing his film’s run­time between scenes of Hogancamp’s mun­dane day-to-day exis­tence and colour­ful motion cap­ture ani­ma­tion sequences (a tech­nique he pre­vi­ous­ly utilised in Beowulf, The Polar Express and A Christ­mas Car­ol) which trans­port us inside his vivid imagination.

The fic­tion­al Bel­gian town of the title is pop­u­lat­ed by Hogancamp’s hero­ic alias, ​“Cap’n Hogie”, and a group of female free­dom fight­ers who rou­tine­ly fend off the Nazis while fluff­ing up their de fac­to leader’s ego. Giv­en that they are lit­er­al­ly plas­tic dolls, it stands to rea­son that the women of Mar­wen are depict­ed as strong yet eas­i­ly pli­able, hol­low ves­sels for male wish ful­fil­ment with lit­tle agency of their own. What is per­haps more telling is that their real-world equiv­a­lents are no more fleshed out.

The film is at its most affect­ing and relat­able when Hogancamp’s rela­tion­ships with the numer­ous women in his life – Gwen­do­line Christie’s Russ­ian car­er, Janelle Monáe’s rehab work­er, Mer­ritt Wever’s hob­by shop own­er, Leslie Mann’s kind­ly neigh­bour – are brought to the fore. But Zemeck­is always seems more pre­oc­cu­pied with deliv­er­ing high-grade action spec­ta­cle than unal­loyed human dra­ma. The longer it goes on, the hard­er it becomes to stay invest­ed in both aspects of the narrative.

For the most part the pos­i­tives out­weigh the neg­a­tives, and Zemeck­is and co-screen­writer Car­o­line Thomp­son deserve cred­it for not gloss­ing over the small but by no means triv­ial detail of Hogancamp’s cross-dress­ing. Yet for all that Wel­come to Mar­wen is an inven­tive, well-inten­tioned biog­ra­phy, Hogen­camp remains some­thing of a quirky enig­ma in the hands of Carell and Zemeck­is, not unlike sev­er­al of the director’s ear­li­er protagonists.