Marwencol (February 25th and 27th at the Cleveland Museum of Art)

[MARWENCOL screens Friday February 25th at 7pm and Sunday February 27th at 1:30pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

As an outsider-artist portrait, MARWENCOL begs comparisons to IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, Jessica Yu's documentary about recluse Henry Darger's obessive private oeuvre. Remember, the lifelong-bachelor janitor who secretly wrote his epic novel about the androgynous "Vivian girls" in a giant war that took place in fantasy realms, and who depicted them in massive collage-cutouts on cheap butcher paper? The difference is that in MARWENCOL the eccentric at the center of the picture is alive and available to explain himself, although key information is foxily withheld from the audience until the third act. But he almost wasn't so alive and available.

A beating outside a bar in Kingston, New York, in 1993, left Mark Hogancamp brain-damaged and comatose. He awakened largely amnesiac, forgetting not only his marriage but, providentially, the chronic alcoholism that might have gotten him into trouble in the first place. Moving back in with his mom, Hogancamp regained his basic life skills and muscle control via self-therapy with his childhood hobby of toy-soldier action figures, redone on a vast (if one-sixth life) scale. Hogancamp doll-populated a fictitious WWII Belgian village, an unofficial neutral oasis called Marwencol, with elaborate Tarantino-esque backstories of intrigues among Germans, Americans, seductive local girls, time-travelers, wicked SS officers - and Hogancamp himself in altar-ego form, as a dashing saloon owner who seems to be always at the center of things in Marwencol. Hogancamp occasionally relives his trauma via dramatized Nazi torture of his totem/avatar. And, shopping cannily for movie tie-in action figures with the right facial features (you might recognize a few), he insinuates doll equivalents of people in his life and co-workers at his subsistence job. Sometimes this is to their considerable discomfort when they pop up as potential love interests for the plastic Hogancamp hero.

The feature's storyline evolves when Hogancamp's closeup photos of Marwencol, shot without irony, just the victim-taking-back-his-power chronicling his mythologized saga, reach the attention of the NYC art world and prompt an exhibition. Hogancamp's apprehension at going to a Greenwich Village gallery opening cues the filmmakers [SPOILER ALERT] to at last open up about Mark's private transvestite fetishes and a possible homophobic motive in his assault. Much as this gives the upbeat close a sense of drama and triumph, one wonders if the movie is holding back any more salient information about this guy, who quite possibly was not as sympathetic before he got his skull kicked in and lost the booze habit the hard way. Are the trendoid gallery owners really taken with Mark as a creative folk-artist type, or exploiting him as some kind of gay freak-show flavor of the month? And where does one end and the other begin? Is this even "art" as we know it? The approach leaves those questions unspoken, hanging there, so take MARWENCOL as a portrait of persecution and recovery, or as a rare meet-and-greet with a rising art nut/obsessive, or proof that Robot Chicken isn't the only inventive use of movie tie-in action figures by adult males. Give yourself a treat if you recognize the name `Deja Thoris' without Googling it. (3 out of 4 stars).