Toronto Sun: Marwencol

originally posted at Toronto Sun:

'Marwencol' deserves Oscar buzz

Editorial Rating: 4.5 (out of 5)

by Jim Slotek

A haunting movie about a haunted man, Marwencol is a revelatory documentary which is already generating Oscar buzz.

It manages to touch, in one personal profile, themes of consciousness, imagination and reality, indomitability of spirit, alternative lifestyles, the nature of art, even the sink-or-swim harshness of the American healthcare system.

And it defends the dignity of the documentary -- a genre that seemingly has been hijacked of late by polemicists and sophomoric pranksters (yo, Joaquin!).

The subject of Marwencol is Mark Hogancamp, a man who was beaten nearly to death by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., in April 2000 and left in a coma. After 40 days in hospital, he emerged with impaired motor skills, severe memory loss (he couldn't remember having once been married for several years) and myriad odd brain chemistry changes (a longtime alcoholic, he found his desire for liquor had completely disappeared).

A perfunctory state-funded therapy program quickly ran out, leaving Hogancamp basically alone. On his own, living in a trailer, he created a strange form of therapy, sort of dollhouse Gestalt. He constructed a town in Nazi-occupied Belgium named Marwencol (a collage of his name and the names of Wendy and Colleen, a co-worker and a friend), full of Barbies, G.I. Joes and other action figures dressed in carefully tailored period clothing to support their backstory.

The backstory: Hogancamp is an American airman who crashes behind enemy lines. Wandering about, he discovers Marwencol, a town where the men have either fled or been conscripted, and the women remain. It's his town now, and he creates a bar reminiscent of Casablanca's Rick's Café Americain, where American and German soldiers can drink in a state of truce.

All, that is, except for the SS, who hover about menacingly seeking the bar.

To Hogancamp, they represent the men who beat him. And in one of his cathartic plotlines, he is kidnapped and tortured by these very same men, with a different result.

In fact, everybody in Marwencol turns out to be a representation of somebody Hogancamp knows in real life. All his friends and co-workers, the married neighbour he knows he can't have (but whom he makes love to in miniature), the professional photographer who discovers his proxy life and deems it art, even the director of the film become characters.

There's a witch, there's a time machine, and there are paroxysms of Inglourious Basterds-style violence (yes, these are dolls we're talking about). Dutifully photographed in storyboard style by their creator with all the emotion and drama their frozen faces can muster, it's no wonder they'd end up in a gallery.

And that's the second half of Marwencol -- Hogancamp's New York debut, and no-less-than heroic attempt to represent himself at his own gallery show.

His "discovery" doesn't make Hogancamp rich, but it does free up other aspects of his damaged personality that paint a fuller picture of what went on that night in 2000.

Hogancamp's artificial reality is clearly so real to him, it demands respect. Credit director Jeff Malmberg, who takes what could have been simply presented as a freak show and allows it its dignity.