FOX TV - Steve Carell’s new film is weird but not wonderful says BRIAN VINER After leaving a bar near his home in New York State one night almost two decades ago, Mark Hogancamp was set upon by five men who beat him so savagely that he was left with permanent brain damage and no memory even of his short marriage.His crime was to tell the men, with whom he’d been chatting quite amiably in the bar, that he had a predilection for wearing women’s shoes.Their brutal attack changed his life in many ways. He had to learn how to walk and talk again. But he also stopped drinking, having previously been an alcoholic, and embarked on a bizarre project which brought him a splash of celebrity. In 2010 he was the subject of an acclaimed documentary, Marwencol.Now, illustrious director Robert Zemeckis, whose 1994 film Forrest Gump was about another American loner with a slow-moving brain, has dramatised, with only fitful success, the story chronicled in the documentary.By any measure it’s quite a tale. In the wake of the attack, Hogancamp (Steve Carell) meticulously builds and then obsessively photographs a kind of model village which he calls Marwen, placing it in Nazi-occupied Belgium at the height of World War II.He fills it with dolls, whose imaginary lives revolve around an action-man figure, a courageous U.S. Air Force pilot called Hogie. Share this article Share As if there were any doubt that this character is meant to be Hogancamp’s own alter ego, Hogie, too, has a thing for women’s shoes. But for him it’s an alpha-male impulse. ‘I like to wear heels sometimes,’ he declares. ‘They somehow connect me to the essence of dames.’Zemeckis uses CGI to animate him — think of a Thunderbirds puppet only rather more lifelike — and the film starts with Hogie’s stricken plane crashing in a forest.Miraculously, he survives unharmed and is walking away from the wreckage when he is captured by a bunch of Nazis, whose hatred for him intensifies when they see he is sporting a pair of elegant stilettos.Soon we have the full picture: the callous Nazis hunting Hogie are meant to represent the bigoted assailants outside the bar, while the feisty female members of the Belgian resistance, who keep rescuing him in the nick of time, are doll versions of the various women who have shown Hogancamp kindness or encouragement.When the attractive Nicol (Leslie Mann) moves in across the road, with her own personal issues in the form of an abusive ex-boyfriend, she soon inspires a new doll, the sexiest of Marwen’s women, and romance begins to brew between her and Hogie.In a deliberately excruciating scene, Hogancamp makes the mistake of conflating his imagination and reality, making a declaration of love to Nicol that she rebuffs as gently as she can. Meanwhile, the date of his attackers’ trial is drawing near, and the prosecution need Hogancamp there to testify. But he is reluctant to attend court, unwilling to be reminded of his trauma.Instead, he withdraws more and more into his invented tableaux, which also include a single malevolent female called
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