Based on a true story, Welcome to Marwen starts where the life of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell) nearly ended, or rather where it began again. On April 8, 2000, outside a bar in upstate New York, five men attacked a drunk Hogancamp after they learned of his penchant for wearing women’s shoes and left him for dead. Now, several years later, Hogancamp has lost all memories of his past life due to the resultant brain damage and is racked by chronic pain. Once a gifted illustrator, his motor skills have deteriorated so severely he can’t hold a pencil. After Medicaid stopped paying for his rehabilitative therapy, Hogancamp began to construct an elaborate WWII-era Belgian city he christens “Marwen” that is fully developed by the time the movie begins. Full of Nazis, beautiful women, and a blue-haired witch (Diane Kruger), this miniature world, it quickly becomes clear, is a theater of the mind where Hogancamp endlessly reenacts the attack and its aftermath in an attempt to come to terms with it.
Young ends her talk by sharing her hope for “a world where we don’t have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning.” By giving us a main character who does quite a bit more than get out of bed and remember his own name in the morning, Welcome to Marwen certainly breaks away from some of the features of “inspiration porn” Young identifies.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis. PG-13, 116 min. In wide release.
