David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Welcome to Marwen and The Mule
Welcome to Marwen
The essential process of
movies is mutation. As art and biz, fun and folly, the medium keeps mutating,
in a tireless shuffling of transformational cards. Welcome to Marwen is a wild card, a showy mutant of Marwencol (which not many saw in 2010).
I was among those who found Jeff Malmberg’s documentary among the best (and
strangest) I had ever seen. Its source and soul is a genuine hero of survival,
Mark Hogancamp.
In 2000 Hogancamp, 38, went
to his local bar in Kingston, N.Y. and got loaded. A flip exchange with five
young, drunken toughs became violent when Mark mentioned his occasional
cross-dressing (main fetish: shoes). Assuming he was gay, the phobes beat him
so badly that he was in a coma for nine days, lost memory of his past, but then
gradually found a therapy beyond his meds. No longer alcoholic, but still high
on shoes, he began collecting and outfitting flexible doll figures, mostly
Barbie-wows combating S.S. sadists (a mutation of the bar brutes).Their sexy,
violent World War II occurs in his Belgian village, built to 1:6 scale on his
modest Kingston property. The vampy babes fight Nazi soldaten who revive like vampires, and are helped by Mark’s alter-ego hero,
a pilot named Hogie. The beauty twist is that, although the bullies destroyed Hogancamp’s
talent for drawing, his art was reborn in his color photos of the Marwencol dramas.
In another mutation, a New York gallery show brought him artistic esteem and
income.
Enter Hollywood “imagineer” Robert
Zemeckis, eagerly and rather bravely spending over $40 million (Malmberg’s
budget: $38,000). The intimate yard settings and naif mise-en-scene of Mark’s art are now launch platforms for an often
brilliant design team’s blasts of war-game fantasy. Human-scale dolls in fab
costumes mutate with live actor/CGI magic, the cast led by Steve Carell as Mark
and (looking airbrushed) Hogie. Now in his glory time, which includes Vice, Beautiful Boy, The Big Short and Foxcatcher, Carell has poignantly nailed
the afflicted, lonely grace of Hogancamp, and without underlining “camp.” The
movie finds some vivid intimacy, as when Mark lovingly outfits a new fem-doll to
Julie London’s “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Beyond kitsch or kinks, Mark loves women.
Zemeckis clearly loves his
story and Marwencol. But now the
fantasy village is called Marwen. The missing “col” might easily stand for
“creativity overcoming limitations,” as the toy-dream Hogancamp world morphs
into a studio mega-mutant. Half an hour longer than Malmberg’s strange, intimate
tribute, this Big Package reminds us that Zemeckis is not only the man who did Cast Away, Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He also gave us
that candy corncob of goo-goo glop, Forrest
Gump. So he milks Mark’s growing crush on a neighbor, puts him through two courtroom
traumas, and adds a queasy salute to the belltower sequence in Vertigo. There is even a flying time
machine, very back to the past of the future. Welcome is stylish, sincere and imaginative, yet Mark Hogancamp’s
best movie remains a small, mysterious documentary.
The Mule
The perfect start of The Mule would show Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) riding a burro up
to the border, then gaping at the Great Wall of Trump. Forget perfection, but
tuck yourself into a cozy mule bag of story oats with this effective bounce off
an actual man’s situation. A WWII veteran and flower gardener in danger of
losing his home, Earl naively (at first) becomes a delivery “mule” for a
Mexican drug cartel, then applies his rich pay to good deeds. Clint is 88 now
and seriously eroded (so much sun in the spaghetti Western years). But in
a rickety way he is still rakish, and aw-shucksy tough (cop to Clint: “You
coulda played Jimmy Stewart”). The writers have protected their antique star by
limiting the crime violence, even satirizing it with preening skeet-shoots of
the drug lord, performed by amusing (and amused) Andy Garcia. The only howlers are
two scenes of nubile whores grateful to please goaty ol’ Earl.
Eastwood directed like Earl drives his truck: smooth
and assured, stretching suspense out along the road, grabbing good shots,
playing famous tunes on his radio, fumbling with digital phones as if they were
Japanese booby traps on Iwo Jima (about which Eastwood made two strong war films).
Solid support at every turn from Garcia, Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, Laurence
Fishburne, Alison Eastwood and, as Earl’s estranged wife, Dianne Wiest (her last
scene is a sunset fit to rival Edward G. Robinson’s in Soylent Green). This may be Clint’s most subtle acting since Bridges of Madison County, and the gentle-tough
movie is not a cranky belch like Gran
Torino. True to Eastwood’s form the picture runs a little long, but it
handles humor, danger, atmosphere, PC issues and family syrup with savvy and
due diligence. For Eastwood, whose face is now almost parchment, whose sandpaper
voice is more paper than sand, this could be the swan song. If so, his hybrid
mutant of swan and mule is very engaging.
SALAD (A List)
12 Richly
Original Modern Documentaries
These go beyond interviews, file clips and obvious
points. In order of arrival:
Carpati: 50
Years 50 Miles (Yale Strom 1996), The Cruise (director Bennett Miller
1997), Keep the River on Your Right: A
Modern Cannibal Tale (David and Laurie Shapiro, 2000), Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thorn Anderson 2003), My Architect (Nathanael Kahn 2003), My Flesh and Blood (Jonathan Karsh
2003), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog
2005), Anvil! The Story of Anvil
(Sacha Gervasi 2009), Senna (Asif
Kapadia 2010), Cave of Forgotten Dreams
(Werner Herzog 2010), Jiro Dreams of
Sushi (David Gelb 2011) and Free Solo
(Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chin Vasarhelyi 2018).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Far
and away Orson Welles’s most popular role was suave villain Harry Lime in The Third Man (1948). In Germany avid young
women pursued him calling “Der Dritte
Mann!,” though it caused Orson chagrin that Carol Reed, not he, had
directed the big hit. Welles launched a BBC radio show, The Adventures of Harry Lime, “figuring that he might as well
benefit from the fact … Orson impressed radio people with his uncanny speed,
knocking together the show. ‘He was a powerhouse,’ said actor Robert Arden, ‘At
the BBC they’d take three days to record a half-hour show. Orson had it all
together and recorded inside one morning.” (From Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Playing
the heartbroken, then healing Travis in Paris,
Texas brought into human fullness all of Harry Dean Stanton’s instinct for
quiet, searching, subtle magic: “The student of Buddhism didn’t act-out, but
in. ‘To be a film actor,’ he avowed, ‘one should never put on an act, on screen
or off. It should be as organic as breathing, but many people don’t know how to
breathe.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris,Texas
chapter of my book Starlight Rising,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Deep
in French caverns, prehistoric horses run free in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Sundance Selects 2010; director Werner
Herzog, photographed by Peter Zeitlinger).
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