Globe and Mail: Marwencol

originally posted at Globe and Mail:

Marwencol: Dolls, Nazis and fiction as brain therapy

Editorial Rating: **** (out of 4)

by Liam Lacey

One of the oddest and most moving documentaries since Best Boy or Grey Gardens, Jeff Malmberg’s debut film, Marwencol, is a marvel. A portrait of a small-town drunk whose near-fatal beating turned him into a compelling outsider artist, it is both an inspirational back-from-the-abyss tale and an uncanny experience of watching a mind trying to heal itself by creating fiction.

In 2000, 38-year-old Mark Hogancamp lived in an upstate New York town where he was a part-time illustrator and “gallon a day” drunk. One night, outside a bar, he was viciously beaten by five men. After recovering from a nine-day coma, he had lost his taste for alcohol and most of his memory. When his health benefits ran out, he invented his own form of therapy to keep his hands and mind busy: he started playing with children’s dolls and action toys.

The result was a 1/6 scale Second World War-era Belgian town named Marwencol that fills his backyard, built of scrap construction materials and populated by more than 100 Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures.

Marwencol (a contraction of the names of Mark and two women friends, Wendy and Colleen) is also a simulacrum of Hogancamp’s hometown, Kingston, N.Y., populated by dolls representing the artist, his friends, the occasional celebrity (Arnold Schwarzenegger, rock star Thom Yorke) and even his assailants, dressed as SS officers.

Because he was unable to draw any more, Hogancamp bought a camera and began photographing his dolls and creating stories about their world. Some of his ideas seem inspired by the 1960s Nazi-prison-camp comedy Hogan’s Heroes (a play on his surname) but there are also time machines, episodes of brutal violence and revenge, and, for the soldiers’ entertainment, evenings of girl-on-girl wrestling.

Malmberg treats Hogancamp, a down-to-earth guy with extremely specific aesthetic ideas, with non-patronizing fascination. We are placed in the world of Marwencol (including a bit of stop animation), shooting the dolls from low angles and getting to know them as characters in an imaginary movie.

But even in a town of plastic heroes and beauties with frozen stares, real life has a way of intruding. A local photographer managed to get Hogancamp’s work into a New York art magazine. A gallery called. Those developments set up the second act of Marwencol, in which Hogancamp deals with his private world going public.

Thanks to some of Malmberg’s own storytelling savvy – he holds back a significant detail of the night that changed Hogancamp’s life until late in the film – Marwencol doesn’t stop delivering surprises until its last frame.