Welcome to Marwen (2018)

Robert Zemeckis, a director who has spent four decades insisting that sentiment and technology can be married, attempts the union once more with a film about a man who photographs dolls. Welcome to Marwen follows Mark Hogancamp, beaten into acute memory loss and post-traumatic stress by strangers, who rebuilds his interior life in miniature: a Belgian village populated by fashion dolls, a captain named Hogie, and a squad of gun-toting women drawn from the strongest people he knows. The animated sequences have a plastic glow and a real melancholy. The live-action sequences do not.

The picture deserves credit where it is due. Mark's habit of wearing women's shoes and dresses is not the punchline of a joke but the reason he was attacked, and the film regards his gender-expansive presentation with a sympathy its own marketing declined to advertise. Around him sits an ensemble of unusual breadth, Janelle Monae, Eiza Gonzalez, Diane Kruger, Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, women who double as his saviors in the fantasy and as ordinary friends in the world. His illness, the delusions, the pill dependency he mistakes for medicine, is the load-bearing wall of the story. That the film finds his recovery through art worth two hours of expensive animation is a small kindness.

The treatment of the facts is less kind. The real attackers were not neo-Nazis, and one of them was a Black sixteen-year-old; the film turns them all into middle-aged white supremacists, trading accuracy for a cleaner villain and never looking back. Critics were unimpressed, audiences stayed home, and the studio lost a great deal of money. A muddled drama about healing, released into a December crowded with superheroes, and promptly forgotten. The Marwen of the title is a place where a man can be heroic. The film surrounding it is a place where nobody quite knew what they were building.