Welcome To Marwen Mega
The documentary inspired the film Welcome to Marwen starring Steve Carell as Hogancamp. Trope Examples Cope by Creating: Mark deals with his trauma through the models and photographs.
Rotten Tomatoes: 24% (average score: 4.9/10)
Qaidi band torrent. Metacritic: 39/100
Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
From the start, the emotional salute to Hogancamp’s heroism in fact and fiction is laboured and unearned. Despite all the bizarre moments with Nazis, torture and fetishism, Zemeckis earnestly tries to sanitise everything tonally, to remove the Diane Arbus factor, the dysfunctional quality which was undoubtedly a factor in making Hogancamp a hit in the world of contemporary art – a feeling that the Marwencol pictures were the symptom as well as the therapy.
The Hollywood Reporter by Keith Uhlich
The one weak link in the production is Carell as the real-world Hogancamp. He often overdoes his character's savant-like tics and at worst comes close to parody. In one scene, he screams in what's supposed to be anguish, and you can't help thinking of Michael Scott doing his 'No, God! Nooooooooooooooooo!!!' routine from The Office. As a simultaneously macho and genderqueer plastic toy on the other hand, he's perfect — go figure.
IGN by Matthew Dougherty
It’s as if Zemeckis banked on the visual effects surrounding the dolls to wow audiences enough that he thought the scenes they play in themselves didn’t have to be particularly memorable. Worse yet, the personalities of the heroic women around Captain Hogie don’t stand apart from each other, turning what’s supposed to be a celebration of powerful women into a row of indistinguishable ones without recognizable personalities, aside from cliché character traits and overwrought accents (Christie’s Russian accent is particularly grating).
Indiewire by David Ehrlich
For all of its CGI wizardry, the drama of “Welcome to Marwen” winds up feeling as artificially manufactured as the miniature figurines who bring it to life. Carell is almost too empathetic a screen presence, as the actor struggles to split the difference between a goofy everyman and a broken artist; the ingratiating cuteness of his performance makes it hard to believe in Mark’s pain.
Slate by Sam Adams
Welcome to Marwen is a tragedy, not because of how Mark’s story ends, but because it’s the work of a filmmaker who’s never been more sure of his craft, and never less connected to anything resembling actual human experience. The movie’s underlying theme is that fantasy is an escape from the real world that can help people return to it, but it doesn’t seem like Zemeckis is ever coming back.
Variety by Owen Gleiberman - Possible Spoilers
Simply put, though, none of this results in a story with much variation or verve. What happens in Marwen is a lot more interesting visually than dramatically, and the upstate characters who become Mark’s circle of acquaintances, like Roberta (Merritt Wever), the winsome sales woman at the shop that sells the dolls, come off as bit players. The one semi-exception is Nicol, played by Leslie Mann.
Vulture by Emily Yoshida
We should perhaps be suspicious when the art made about an artist begins to overshadow the artist’s actual work. The cyclical drama of Marwencol, as one can gather from Hogancamp’s work and the bits of it we see in both Malmberg’s and Zemeckis’s films, is a totally engrossing blend of violence and sadism, sex, masculinity, matriarchy, and magic. It’s repeated over and over again that the project is Hogancamp’s form of therapy and self-excavation, but isn’t most art, at some point or another?
