Welcome to Marwen
Ten Second Review: A really interesting take on looking at the experience of someone living with trauma that falls short of the mark of great cinema.
I was a little late to Welcome to Marwen. I wasn’t late in hearing about it, when the trailer popped up about six months ago I was immediately excited but I couldn’t seem to find the time to watch it when it came out. The result was that I saw some of the quite negative reviews floating around about the film. I try quite hard to not see or read reviews before I go and watch a film but unfortunately in this instance I failed. I was determined to not let other opinions alter or taint my own and was still really excited for the film, going in sure I would like it.
The movie recounts the real story of Mark Hogancamp, a man who was attacked by a group of men after drunkenly saying he wore women’s shoes. To cope with his trauma and anxiety, Hogancamp builds a scale model of an imaginary town populated by dolls that represent his friends and his attackers. The town, Marwen, is a fictional Belgian town set in WWII. The film follows Mark as he lives out his day to day routine in the lead up to the trial of his attackers and an art show based on his photography of Marwen and its inhabitants.
Sadly, even with my intention of enjoying it, I don’t think I could say that Welcome to Marwen was a good film. There are lots and lots of great things about the film but lots of good elements does not a good film make.
The first thing to say is that the performance from Steve Carell is perfectly fine. It is not his finest work but it functions well enough in the story he was given to work with. I do however wonder if a different script or different direction could have offered us the chance to see Carell in one of his finest roles yet. There are moments where you truly feel this man’s pain coming through the screen and, as much as some clever cinematic devices help this, most of that is down to Carell. There is a true feeling that you get throughout the film that you are seeing inside of this man’s trauma and getting a very intimate view of how his manufactured world helps him to cope.
The scenes that involve the dolls are also amazing. The opening scene is a lot of fun and very interesting to watch but it also immediately immerses you within Hogancamp’s world. This bizarre effect of having these two parallel worlds (the real world and Marwen) is wonderfully portrayed and easily my favourite part of the film. I was sat there just waiting to see where the story would take us.
Sadly, that’s where the film’s problems lie. At nearly two hours the film has the room to really explore its main character and you never feel fully satisfied that it does. You get these little vignettes of the characters that inspire the inhabitants of Marwen but there is no satisfying conclusion for any of them. I would understand, if the film was going for an almost documentary level of accuracy, that they could not have these endings, but considering how the story has been altered it seems a mistake to not neatly round these characters off too. They end up becoming window dressing to an already messy film which leads into a more general critique of the film: it’s a little creepy.
Between his attitude toward the women in his life to the way he dresses them and literally builds a fantasy around them, the film doesn’t really delve deep enough to these characters for them to be seen as fully realised and they come off as just objects and play things. There is a clear drive that the film has to illustrate the importance of the women in his life to him and the therapy that the town brings him, but it misses the mark and comes of as unfinished, awkward and stunted.
I really do think there is a good film somewhere in Welcome to Marwen. The moments where it truly captures Mark’s trauma and some of the special effects are amazing to watch, but by over-stretching itself and not satisfyingly resolving most of its plots it shoots itself in the foot. A more focused story might have helped it, a different narrative arch might have helped it too but sadly, while it tries to tell a very interesting story, it falls far short of that mark.
