Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #139: Welcome to Marwen (2018).

For Mark Hogencamp (Steve Carell), life has recently been very challenging and unusual. A drunken mention of how he enjoys wearing women's shoes copped him a beating from a white supremacist group, which left him with severe amnesia and PTSD. To cope with those afflictions, he's created, out of various dolls, toys and artistic backdrops, a fantastical land called Marwen where he frequently and publicly recreates WWII air battles. In a rather Wizard of Oz-style fashion the dolls all correspond with people in his real life, with him leading the charges as Cap'n Hogie. A Belgian witch doll named Deja Thoris (Diane Kruger), like the Edgar Rice Burroughs character, is out to stop Hogie from becoming attached to any woman. But after Mark is finally convinced to take his attackers to court and the hearing descends into him imagining it as a Nazi attack and fleeing after which the trial is postponed, he meets and quickly falls for his new real-life neighbour Nicol (Leslie Mann, who also plays her Marwen counterpart), but that's not mutual.

I was immediately interested in this movie when learning it was from Robert Zemeckis, easily one of my favourite directors, and screenwriter Caroline Thompson, who wrote Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas (I also have a Tim Burton fetish), but my lingering main thought about it is that it's bar none the strangest movie Zemeckis has ever made. It's like Tropic Thunder meets Ruby Sparks meets Team America: World Police, believe it or not. Zemeckis and Thompson do treat Mark's troubled situation with clear impartiality and sensitivity, and the visual and model effects are seamlessly integrated particularly for what's now a pretty minor budget ($50 million). Carell's and Mann's performances also convey that impartiality and sensitivity also. But the real problem here is the story itself. It's actually based on fact (the real Hogencamp is shown at the end), but for me its recreation here just sorely lacks any obvious narrative trajectory; no establishing and solving of a problem, in other words. Therefore, it just didn't quite grab me. Zemeckis' usual composer Alan Silvestri's quite lazy score also doesn't help.

Zemeckis and Thompson are still really capable of great work, but I'm afraid I can see why Welcome to Marwen flopped critically and commercially. 6/10.