- For once, I feel like I’m at a loss for words. This is rare, I know. My typical m.o. is to snark (with love or with hate) on most everything I see and I really can’t bring myself to do that on this one. It’s too upsetting.
- On the one hand, you have this guy who is producing amazing work both in terms of his skills with 1/6 scale models but also with his unassuming photography talents. On the other hand, you have a guy who is suffering from post-traumatic stress that is so strong that the lines between his real life and his 1/6 life are blurry to the point where his 1/6 doll version of himself has created a 1/6 world within the existing 1/6 world. You are not reading that incorrectly: his mental illness is so intense that he does not just have PTSD, he has meta PTSD.
- The level of misanthropy I am feeling right now as a result of knowing this man’s traumas would be completely nonexistent if it weren’t for a gang of completely hateful drunk douchebags is astounding.
- Hogancamp works through his trauma through very elaborate role-playing with the dolls in his town, culminating in more than one sequence where he’s kidnapped and tortured by a group of Nazis, who are then in turn on the receiving end of revenge scenarios dished out by the women of Marwencol who save Hogancamp. It makes Tarantino’s Nazi revenge fantasy seem juvenile and gratuitous by comparison. (Oh, wait.)
- One of the Nazi dolls actually looked like Thomas Kretschmann, which just about killed me.
- I shouldn’t mislead you into thinking the entire movie is depressing. There is lots of humour and Hogancamp himself is genial and funny, it just comes with a twinge of sadness around the edges.
- I liked how Hogancamp’s friends and coworkers embraced his town rather than getting creeped out by his adding their likenesses to his re-enactments. There was one amusing sequence where Mark was describing his coworker Lisa’s alter ego as dating some random soldier in the story “… but she didn’t know I had a Steve McQueen doll!”, after which point her doll dumped the other guy and went with Steve. They quickly cut to the real life woman and she was like “Well, yeah, clearly I’d choose Steve McQueen!” Same with things like his mom’s alter ego being a Pussy Galore doll because his mom kind of does look like Honor Blackman in Goldfinger.
- The photographs that he takes of his town are quite wonderful. Like the magazine editor in the movie (or whoever he was), I’m also bored of seeing Art With Toys that is ironic and winky; Hogancamp’s work just manifests his internal struggles instead of trying to be clever all the goddamned time. There’s also just a lot of good technical skill in the work; the compositions are great and I like the way he uses depth of field. It also weirded me out how natural the dolls felt in the photos; you expect them to feel stiff and posed but they come across as naturally as if they were real people in real photos from WWII. It’s totally bizarre. They could be story boards for the next great WWII movie. Everything is part of an actual story, not just the illustration of a concept or feeling.
- They were selling little storybook versions of the photos but the director only had a handful left and I was sitting far enough back in the theatre that there was already a big crowd of people swarming him after the Q&A. You can get it on the Marwencol website, though, so I might still order it. (All proceeds go to Hogancamp and his family to support his work.)
Marwencol
I don’t know whether to love or hate humanity after this.
IMDB Plot Synopsis After a vicious attacks leaves him brain-damaged and broke, Mark Hogancamp seeks recovery in "Marwencol", a 1/6th scale World War II-era town he creates in his backyard.