I just watched Welcome to Marwen, Robert Zemeckis’ new film.
I almost missed it. Since it only earned a rating of 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m sure I’m not the only one who crossed it off their list.
But here’s a tip. Rotten Tomatoes is aimed at the ‘I rely on movies to babysit my kids’ crowd. As a result, most of the really bad reviews are for films that have adult content.
For instance, the holiday flick Holmes and Watson got only a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and rightly so. I saw it and I can attest to the fact that it’s basically a bunch of bad penis jokes.
But Welcome to Marwen is, on the other hand, a real work of art. It easily measures up — perhaps surpasses —Zemickis’ earlier classic Forest Gump.
Unfortunately hardly anyone is going to see it.
What a lush, gorgeous, thoughtul, compassionate, imaginative movie this is! I had tears in my eyes when I wasn’t laughing. It’s based on the real life story of Mark Hogancamp, an outsider artist who created his groundbreaking works after being almost beaten to death by a bunch of thugs. He was left with parts of his memory and some cognitive skills missing. As part of his recovery, he devoted himself to photography — producing achingly beautiful photographs of the dolls that peopled the miniature cardboard city he created in his own back yard.
But Zemickis’ film has a beauty all its own. He has used his consummate animation skills to recreate Hogancamp’s inner artistic world. You will find yourself watching animated scenes full of unlikely drama that are disturbingly, absorbingly ‘real.’ The film careful explicates the complex relationship between art and the soul.
So why is everyone ignoring it?
Like the TV shows of Louis C.K., and the movies of Woody Allen, Welcome to Marwen is the most recent casualty of #MeToo. Whatever the noble intentions of that movement, the effect (as the French feminists have noted) has been to put a chill on sexual art.
Zemeckis’ masterpiece is a film about a heterosexual crossdresser. Mark Hogencamp was a shoe fetishist who photographed busty Barbie Dolls in sexy outfits. One of the ‘politically correct’ criticisms of Welcome to Marwen on Rotten Tomatoes tells us: “The female characters in Welcome to Marwen are all a little too yielding, a little too understanding... They expect so little of Hogancamp that it's all too easy for him to impress them, and all too easy for us to feel good about ourselves in the process.”
Right. Women should reject a sexual man like Hogancamp, shouldn’t they? It doesn’t matter that Hogancamp was effectively a victim of gaybashing. We are told to have no compassion for the man, and consequently not to enjoy a movie about him — because, in his dreams and his art, he had sexual fantasies about women and liked to wear high heels.
It was a vicious hate crime when those thugs to beat up Hogan Marencamp for acting ‘queer.’
But when you reject Zemeckis’ film for the same reason? Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but — you’re doing exactly the same thing.
