Mark Hogancamp made big mistake. Drunk and loose-lipped, he told a mean looking bunch of strangers in a bar about women’s shoes—how he liked wearing them. They brought him outside, beat him and left him on the ground to die. Emerging from a nine-day coma, Mark never entirely regained his old self but erected a new one from the building blocks of fantasy.
Inspired by a documentary on Mark, Welcome to Marwen stars Steve Carell as a man struggling to live after most of his memory was pulverized by boot blows to the head. He builds a miniature village in his yard and populates it with dolls and action figures as the setting for a repetitive fantasy. He photographs the scenes he arranged (and his photos would later win nods in gallery shows). In this world he is always Capt. Hogie, a brave World War II flyer, with can-do to spare, shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe. Hogie holes up in the shell of a Belgian town, Marwen, where he leads a band of scantily-clad women from various nationalities in a partisan war against the Nazis. Continually confronted by a Waffen SS squad, Hogie and company gun them down time and again. The Nazis keep coming like the monster that won’t die. And he continues to battle them like a hero from the comic books he drew before his memory was shattered. Mark is trapped in an unending loop, unable to recover his past but afraid to move forward.
The world he constructs is compounded from the women he encountered after his beating merged with comic book B-movie WWII imagery and repressed snatches of memory. One of the men who beat him wore a swastika tattoo. Nazis as figures of callous cruelty are Welcome to Marwen’s recurring theme. Very much like a Nazi is Kurt (Neil Jackson), the menacing ex-boyfriend of the woman who moves in across the road, Nicol (Leslie Mann).
Perpetually smiling and unfailingly nice in her retro dresses, Nicol is almost too good to be true and could have wandered in from a David Lynch film. In much the same way, the small town where Mark lives is incredibly tolerant of his many quirks. He works odd jobs at the bar where he was beaten and is befriended by all, including the counter clerk at the hobby store, Roberta (Merritt Wever), who likes him. He buys his dolls at the store and accessorizes them at home. One hopes the kindness Mark is shown in the movie is based on truth.
Mark admits to being “different” and falls into no broad category. He’s not gay and not even much of a cross-dresser. He likes wearing women’s shoes but denies being a shoe fetishist. Wearing them, he explains, helps him “connect to the essence of dames.” Mark talks like that, as if he’s in a movie from 1943. Women are “dames” or “dolls.” In fact, the women most vivid in his life are the dolls he arranges, not the people they are based on.
Welcome to Marwen is uncomfortable and comforting, the screenplay co-written by director Robert Zemeckis (Forest Gump) is sweet and sad, inspiring and disturbing. Carell deserves attention for his deeply felt performance as a damaged but benign person, frightened by intimacy as well as loneliness, diminished but continuing. He’s stuck in a groove like a broken vinyl record, but then, so are most of us. Zemeckis also deserves credit for blending live action with animation in a seamless lockstep between Mark’s reality and his dreamworld-nightmare.
