Welcome to Marwen: An enchanting riff on real-world drama

Welcome to Marwen (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.21.18

This story is so delicate and fragile — its approach so unconventional — that the slightest misstep would ruin it.

Because the real world is too frightening for him to confront at most times, Mark
Hogancamp (Steve Carell) finds solace in a miniature community that he populates
with characters he's able to control.

Far more than most films, viewer response will be completely polarized. Some (most, I fear) will dismiss it as gimmicky nonsense. But those who have any experience with gravely damaged souls, and their struggle to find coping mechanisms, can’t help being charmed — even deeply touched — by what director Robert Zemeckis has wrought.

On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was savagely beaten by five men and left for dead outside of a bar in Kingston, N.Y. He was brutalized after foolishly admitting — prudence abandoned due to an alcohol haze — that he liked to cross-dress.

He woke after nine days in a coma, all memory of his previous life completely gone: Navy service, a marriage and family, his talent as a sketch artist, and a descent into homelessness and even brief stints in jail. In a sense, he was reborn at age 38, forced during torturous physical and mental therapy to relearn how to eat, walk and even navigate the minor complexities of an average day.

Proving once again that artists are born, not made — and that if one means of expression is suppressed, another will rise to take its place — Mark sorta/kinda backed his way into an entirely new career: one which, in turn, proved beneficial to his raging PTSD nightmares.

Hogancamp was profiled in director Jeff Malmberg’s award-winning 2010 documentary, Marwencol; he’s now the subject of Zemeckis’ most audaciously innovative drama to date. (That’s saying quite a lot, given that we’re talking about the filmmaker who has pushed multiple narrative and effects boundaries with Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol and — most recently — The Walk.)

Zemeckis and co-scripter Caroline Thompson open their film with a literal bang, as we’re introduced to star Steve Carell piloting an Allied aircraft over Belgian skies, during World War II. His plane is strafed beyond repair; he makes a successful crash-landing.

By this point, it has become obvious that Carell looks … not quite right. His features are shiny, his movements oddly jerky. Total disorientation takes hold when we notice that his wrists are jointed, attached to arms that seem a little thin.

Our hero is ambushed by a quintet of Nazis. Death seems imminent, until he’s rescued by a quintet of gun-toting women of varying nationalities, who blow the Nazis into smithereens. They collapse like … well … discarded dolls.

The Walk: Nary a misstep

The Walk (2015) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG, for minor profanity and chaste nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.2.15

And I worried that this film might be dull.

The saga of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, in the summer of 1974? OK, granted; it was an amazingly audacious stunt, and an impressive display of awesome dexterity and physical prowess. But how in the world could that sustain a two-hour film?

Once they've become an item, Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shares his impossible,
idealistic scheme with Annie (Charlotte Le Bon): to somehow run a cable between the two
closest corners of New York's fabled Twin Towers, and then to embark on the most
incredible — and dangerous — wire walk ever attempted.

Silly me.

Director Robert Zemeckis’ exhilarating depiction of Petit’s bold feat is almost as exciting as the historic walk itself. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s breathtaking, crystal-clear camera angles blend seamlessly with Kevin Baillie’s visual effects, to put us “right there” at virtually impossible moments.

I haven’t been this dazzled by a film’s visuals since Claudio Miranda’s Academy Award-winning work in 2012’s Life of Pi.

Wolski and Baillie also make excellent use of their 3D effects, for which this film clearly was designed. The dimensionality is integrated smoothly, often to enhance the sense of vertigo — particularly during the third act — as we peer down from the top of one of the towers. 3D cinematography hasn’t been used this well since Martin Scorsese’s marvelous handling of the technology, in 2011’s Hugo.

Inevitably, whether at a circus or elsewhere, we always watch wire-walkers from below; it simply isn’t possible to do otherwise. But that’s precisely what Zemeckis and his team pull off: We often experience Petit’s work from above — disorienting enough — or even as if we’re standing alongside him.

Our rational minds insist that what we’re watching couldn’t possibly be real, just as our hearts suggest otherwise.

Which is a reaction that Petit, an impudent showman through and through, would both understand and encourage.

The riveting screenplay — by Zemeckis and co-scripter Christopher Browne, based on Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds — also contributes greatly to this film’s enthralling allure. Zemeckis and Browne don’t treat this as “mere” build-up to a fleeting display of athletic grace; it is, instead, one of cinema’s ultimate, clenched-knuckle heist flicks, told with the panache and verbal flamboyance of a circus barker.

Flight: Absolutely soars

Flight (2012) • View trailer
4.5 stars. Rating: R, for drug and alcohol abuse, profanity, nudity, sexuality and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

I can hear Rod Serling’s laconic précis, were he summoned across the bridge of time to introduce this story:

“Portrait of a man, going down for the third time ... and he doesn’t know it.”

Whip (Denzel Washington) likes Nicole (Kelly Reilly) at first sight, and the attraction is
mutual. Unfortunately, she's a recovering addict, and he remains an unrepentant
alcoholic. She's knows he'd be bad for her — perhaps even fatal — but does she
have the strength to resist him?

Flight will catch people by surprise, the same way Million Dollar Baby took its sharp turn in the third act. Advance publicity has centered on the horrific, mid-flight plane crisis, and the suggestion that something “unexpected” turns up during the subsequent investigation.

But John Gatins’ superb, richly nuanced script is much, much deeper than that; indeed, it probes into the very soul of a profoundly flawed man who expects a single heroic act to compensate for a lifetime of ill-advised behavior. Gatins’ narrative also takes intriguing detours, the first one so disorienting — as a new character is introduced — that you’ll briefly wonder if somebody added a reel from an entirely different film.

Let it be said, as well, that Flight gives Denzel Washington yet another opportunity to demonstrate his amazing range and subtlety. He’s simply fascinating to watch, even when at rest ... because that’s the thing; he never is truly at rest. His fingers twitch; his eyes dart through double-takes; he radiates the nervous tension of a caged animal waiting to bolt.

We can’t take our eyes off him. Don’t want to.

Director Robert Zemeckis, having finally shaken his obsession with motion-capture animation — The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol — returns to the probing, tightly focused, intensely intimate character drama that he delivered so well in Cast Away and Contact. This new film is a raw, unflinchingly uncomfortable portrait of a man who takes for granted his ability to remain in control, a politician’s superficial smile on his face, despite the deeply rooted rage and despair that threaten to overwhelm him.

At the same time, Zemeckis, Gatins and Washington deliver an unnervingly grim study of an alcoholic: a drama so memorable that it deserves to be placed alongside earlier classics such as The Lost Weekend, The Days of Wine and Roses and Leaving Las Vegas.

Probably not what people will expect, if they’re drawn to this film by the poster art that shows a capable, if mildly anxious Washington, resplendent in his airline captain’s uniform. Like I said, this one will surprise you.

A Christmas Carol: What the Dickens?

A Christmas Carol (2009) • View trailer for A Christmas Carol
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG, despite considerable dramatic intensity and quite scary scenes
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.6.09
Buy DVD: A Christmas Carol• Buy Blu-Ray: Disney's A Christmas Carol (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)

Despite the frequently awkward blend of Charles Dickens, Jim Carrey and 21st century computer graphics, director/scripter Robert Zemeckis gets an impressive number of things just right: enough that, at first, we have reason to be optimistic about this rather unusual adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Sadly, Zemeckis also gets a lot of things disastrously, jaw-droppingly wrong.

Ebenezer Scrooge (sorta-kinda Jim Carrey, right) reluctantly allows the Ghost
of Christmas Present (Carrey again) to begin a journey through London -- a
trip that will reveal painful details about Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit -- in
director Robert Zemeckis' ill-advised CGI adaptation of Charles Dickens'
classic holiday tale.

By the time the Ghost of Christmas Future shows up, you'll wonder if Zemeckis is designing a Disneyland theme park ride, rather than honoring the legacy of the most famous holiday story in recent history.

Zemeckis clearly is fixated by this hybrid animation process — which builds its characters, like the old-fashioned rotoscoping technique, by re-imaging actual people — that he first used in his adaptation of The Polar Express (2004) and then in Beowulf (2007). Although the technology has improved with each film, it remains distracting on many levels.

The core argument is the most basic: If one hires the likes of a Jim Carrey, why not simply use him?

Granted, animation allows a filmmaker the ability to put his "cast" through trials and tribulations that no flesh-and-blood actor ever could attempt, let alone survive. Zemeckis takes advantage of this many, many times during A Christmas Carol, and the simple touches often are the best: a sneer that not even Carrey's malleable features could produce, a disturbingly bony finger beckoning from a distance.

And Scrooge's encounter with the seven-years-dead Marley, late one dark night, is a masterpiece of editing, pacing and dialogue lifted faithfully from Dickens' novella. Unsettling camera angles blend with a truly frightening phantasm to produce an encounter that no man could soon forget. Nor do we.

But then, almost as if drunk with a puppeteer's power, Zemeckis overplays these techniques. Whizzing through the streets of London, passing in and around obstacles inserted to juice up the 3-D "in our face" effects, is breathtaking and exciting. The first time. Even the second time. But Zemeckis repeats this gag over and over and over again, until it becomes both tiresome and quite likely to induce nausea in vertigo-sensitive viewers.

It's an old lesson, and one worth remembering: The mere fact that one possesses the ability to design a dramatic sequence a certain way, doesn't mean that one should over-indulge and yield to it at every opportunity.