Went to see the new Steve Carell film Welcome to Marwen. This is a well-meaning Robert Zemeckis film that gets just about everything wrong that can go wrong, except for competent film-making. Good acting, directing, editing, FX, etc… but everything on a story and script level is just impossibly, improbably wrong-headed on every level.

Not that the movie means wrong. It means exceedingly well. It’s based on a true story of an artist who gets beaten up so badly he forgets everything in his life, including his ability to draw. So he takes to photographing dolls in a WWII storyline (set in a fictional town of Marwen, Belgium) as partly a coping mechanism and partly to continue to do art. In this film, his dolls come to life as CG animated plastic, with his stand-in – a WW2 fighter pilot – and the fighting women of Marwen re-enacting battles against plastic Nazi dolls. These sequences are, if nothing else, well done.

But the problem with those dolls – which I’m sure are part of the real story – is that the movie uses them too much as a hand wavey excuse, explanation, and cure for mental illness. Plus they are a function of the main characters problems in a way that fetishises the women in his life on an unhealthy and, frankly, really creepy level. So much of the character and his idol worship of the dolls is weird and creepy when it’s meant to be, I don’t know… uplifting?

The main character was beaten badly because he likes to wear women’s shoes… not because he’s queer (the word used in the film), but because it brings him closer to the essence of woman. Because he loves dames, as he insists on multiple occasions. Most of the women in his life become these bad-ass Nazi resistance fighters… but also his favorite actress who keeps losing her shirt in his photographs. Who is his favorite actress? A porn star… something he doesn’t realize might seem a little weird when he says it to his new crush, the lady who moves in next door. He spies on her and promptly turns her into a plastic doll in his art/fantasy life.

It’s all just unintentionally creepy and off-putting. Every decision they make involving these dolls and his idolatrary of them and the real life women just feels icky. And they don’t seem to realize it. I mean, they acknowledge he’s got mental problems due to the beating he took so the film-makers know there’s issues… but the solutions to those issues are never seen as anything but healthy. I think. I dunno. It’s just super weird.

So, yeah, no…. I can’t recommend this well-meaning (I guess) film. On top of the things it gets wrong or weird, it’s also just not very interesting and I’d roll my eyes every time it went into plastic doll war story mode. None of that was funny or exciting… though maybe I was being swayed by the ick factor. I suspect if you can look past some of this, you might enjoy the film. It’s certainly a competent, well made flick.

Score: 59