Universal Pictures’ Welcome to Marwen, like most of today’s media, is produced to make you look, not think.
And, for many reasons, despite good work by star Steve Carell (TV’s The Office, Hope Springs, Battle of the Sexes) and director Robert Zemeckis (The Walk, Forrest Gump, Flight, Allied, The Polar Express), Welcome to Marwen doesn’t prompt the audience to think. This leaves the audience to drift as Marwen overcompensates and confuses.
With too many characters and subplots, reducing Janelle Monae (Hidden Figures, Moonlight) to a single flashback scene, Welcome to Marwen primarily exists to show off visual technology. Using Carell’s main character, a cross-dressing illustrator who’s singled out for attack by a band of bar thugs, the script covers fetishizing, mental illness, brain damage, physical therapy, war, hobbyists, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, stalking and domestic violence. If you’re exhausted reading it, imagine seeing it crammed into what’s on screen.
All this and a neighbor character played by Leslie Mann, who plays the same high-pitched cipher in every film, rebuffs an intimidating ex-boyfriend who’s not just a cop with an attitude but a bomb squad cop with a DUI. Everything in this movie, including the all-female band of dolls Carell’s badly damaged character keeps, dresses and sets into play in a wartime Belgian village, is too much.
Everything, from teapots to costumes, is conspicuously recreated to resemble or replicate the movie’s dollhouse theme. If even a few of the characters, issues and elements were jettisoned, Welcome to Marwen might’ve succeeded in making the audience think twice about artists being different, needing to bend the rules or indulge in a sense of play. That life can’t be faked like a carefully constructed playhouse could have come through and made the climax more rewarding. The only real sense of conflict emanates from the psychological origins of a blue-haired doll.
But that and everything else that happens in Marwen and upstate New York is utterly predictable. Carell is very good here as the deeply wounded artist. Merritt Wever as Roberta the hobby shop clerk is also very good. Cast and crew do their best to make the town that pulls together, like the villagers in the northern town in the similar but superior Lars and the Real Girl, seem plausible. The all-consuming directive to infuse every frame of the film with some virtual reality/visual tie-in makes Welcome to Marwen as artificial as its dolls.