“Welcome to Marwen” One of the Worst Films of 2018

This is a case of a director already known for playing with too many toys still trying to build a better mousetrap while the perfectly good cheese sitting right before him simply needs a more restrained pairing. Robert Zemeckis’s treacly Welcome to Marwen (D+) dramatizes events about a real-life artist who, after experiencing a traumatic assault rendering him frail and without memory, picks up the pieces through building a miniature city populated with dolls representing the support system and demons he must confront in his healing. Steve Carell’s sincere central performance isn’t well served by the director’s fussy technical gobbledegook and cloying blasts in tone between an unreal real world and a half-baked fantasy story. The filmmaker constantly pays self-homage to many of his other, better works and transports viewers right out of the moment (was a Back to the Future flying time travel device or a backwards Death Becomes Her head entirely necessary in telling this tender tale?). The dolls are unappealing stiffs, waxy and wobbly in the same way Zemeckis’s Polar Express characters’ eyes were moribund. It looked too much like the Team America squad had arrived to teach everybody a manipulative morality play. The first half of the film was so deficient in dialogue and storytelling that it was a pleasant surprise midway for some strangely moving moments to claw through all the claptrap. Singular acting kudos go to Leslie Mann, fun to watch with all her wonder and whimsy in an underwritten role. The story’s occasional snatches of sentiment are undercut by the filmmaker’s balderdash, tossing in hate crimes and opioid addiction subplots just in case there’s anything else of seeming significance he can trot out onto the playroom floor. Simply unable to let the allegorical material speak for itself, gadget happy Zemeckis is still playing in his Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump met Beowulf world while his ho-Hummell misfire plops into the porcelain pot.

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