A photographer who lived nearby was fascinated by the intensity and passion of these images he published an article about them which led to an exhibition and the documentary.
He then photographed action figures in various poses with Hogancamp himself represented as a GI Joe-type hero, his attackers as the Nazis, and the women who helped him – friends, therapists – as a fierce crew of heroine-avengers who save him from the bad guys. He miraculously recovered from his coma, though with his memory mostly shot, and then with heroic creativity worked though his fears and transformed his agony into art by building a tiny scale model of a fictional second world war Belgian town called Marwencol in his garden. In 2000, Hogancamp was savagely beaten and left for dead by homophobic bigots outside a bar, after he told them he liked cross-dressing. But he’s awful when he has to be sweetly life-affirming and adorable. He can play great comedy or irony, as in Anchorman, and he can be brilliant in a really dark role, as in Foxcatcher. It sentimentalises a story already told in Jeff Malmberg’s award-winning 2010 documentary Marwencol – and it plays to Steve Carell’s terrible weakness as an actor. T he remarkable career of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp has been turned into an elaborate and misjudged movie of baffling pass-agg ickiness and pointlessness.
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