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Dec 21, 2018 · Welcome to Marwen tells the miraculous true story of one broken man’s fight as he discovers how artistic imagination can restore the human spirit. [Universal] When a devastating attack shatters Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell) and wipes away all memories, no one expected recovery.
- (38)
- Robert Zemeckis
- PG-13
- Steve Carell
No one expects Mark Hogancamp to recover from a devastating assault that wipes away all of his memories. Putting together pieces from the past and present, Mark meticulously creates a Belgian...
- (172)
- Robert Zemeckis
- PG-13
- Steve Carell
Dec 21, 2018 · 116 minutes ‧ PG-13 ‧ 2018. Glenn Kenny. December 21, 2018. 5 min read. In 2015, Robert Zemeckis directed “ The Walk,” a fictionalized version of the story of Phillipe Petit, the acrobat who in 1974 did a high-wire crossing of the chasm between New York’s Twin Towers.
- Romancing the Plastic.
- Verdict
By Matthew Dougherty
Posted: Dec 21, 2018 2:25 am
Late in Welcome to Marwen, there is a series of impossible to miss visual callbacks to Back to the Future. While they are among the most fun moments in director Robert Zemeckis’ latest aesthetically ambitious feature, they also serve as a reminder that this is in fact the guy who directed Back to the Future. Now, more than 30 years later, he’s releasing Welcome to Marwen, easily the biggest blunder in a career that has, frankly, been all over the place. There’s something cynically poetic about a director purposefully reminding audiences of his best film whilst in the third act of his worst, but then there’s also something cynical about the way the director tells this tale.
Following the true story of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell)—an artist turned photographer after an assault left him with brain damage—Zemeckis splits the film into two visually distinct styles. There’s Mark’s everyday life, photographing his dolls made to resemble himself and the various women in his life (Merrit Wever, Janelle Monae, Eliza Gonzalez, Gwendoline Christie, and Leslie Zemeckis, all with varying degrees of significance and screentime, but none with much of a personality), and then the animated world inspired by Mark’s imagination, as acted by his dolls, chiefly his personal doppelganger, Captain Hogie. Mark’s trauma and road to recovery are turned into Zemeckis’ latest playground for visual effects, which only really succeeds in dampening his inner conflict into something silly.
The animation style is as if Zemeckis’ own Beowulf bore a child with Toy Story, and it admittedly has its appealing moments, visually speaking, but the story simply never comes together. As Mark struggles to find strength in his real life, Captain Hogie embarks on an uncomfortable male power fantasy, in which he’s surrounded by powerful yet scantily clothed female dolls as they all fight Nazis together in a revisionist take on World War II. This current stage of Zemeckis’ career has long been marred by putting style over substance, and by living so much in Mark’s fantasy world, Welcome to Marwen practically avoids the real world until the various moments where the plot needs to advance.
The main drive of the story in the outside world is the arrival of Mark’s new neighbor, Nicol (Leslie Mann), who becomes the object of his affections in both worlds. Guess which one immediately works out better for him. Disturbingly living out his romantic fantasies through his dolls quickly turns Mark into a character difficult to sympathize with. Despite his talents exhibited recently as a serious actor, Carell can’t make this schmaltzy, morally confused script work.
Director Robert Zemeckis hits a new artistic low with Welcome to Marwen, a film that mistakes schmaltz for substance and employs downright boring novelty animation in a hackneyed attempt to stir the emotions.
- Matthew Dougherty
Welcome to Marwen explores trauma and gender identity with the tact of a plane crash. Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 26, 2020. Yasser Medina Cinefilia. The Zemeckis movie,...
Dec 20, 2018 · Mark Hogancamp is a remarkable man. His story is a remarkable one: the victim of a savage hate-crime that strips him of his memory, and unable to afford therapy, he constructs a miniature WWII...
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Dec 19, 2018 · Marwen, the 1:6 scale Belgian village that sits outside his trailer home in Kingston, New York, is already fully operational, populated by Mark’s WWII fighter pilot doll proxy, and a bevy of...
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