‘Marwencol’ — 3 1/2 stars
In the imaginings of Mark Hogancamp, Marwencol is a little town in Belgium. The time is World War II. This town miraculously accommodates peaceful, though sometimes socially rowdy, gatherings of Nazis, Allies and the local women, all of whom are extremely leggy and busty and look like dolls.
And they are.
“Marwencol,” the documentary opening at the Siskel Film Center, is the story of Hogancamp and how he came to create an entire model town populated with one-sixth scale dolls — the result of his ongoing therapy, and the eventual subject of a photographic exhibition that brought the insular Hogancamp out of his shell for a while.
In 2000 Hogancamp suffered a near-fatal beating outside a tavern in his hometown, Kingston, N.Y., north of Poughkeepsie. The attack left him with brain damage and severe memory loss. After his Medicaid ran out, he started building Marwencol. The people in his real life — neighbors, friends, even those who attacked him — became the WWII alter ego figures in the town. Hogancamp’s alter ego, “Capt. Hogancamp,” runs a bar in Marwencol, where “cat fights” are staged regularly. When Hogancamp’s rage gets the best of him, he transforms his psychic demons into bloody tableaux (the SS are generally the victims; the blood is blood-red nail polish), which he then photographs.
There is a secret to “Marwencol,” a facet of Hogancamp’s life the director Jeff Malmberg holds back until the two-thirds point of this eccentric, coolly transfixing picture. (Hogancamp was also the subject of a 2008 TV episode of “This American Life.”) The movie manages to say a lot about machismo, memory and ways of escape while keeping its focus entirely on the man at the center of things. What happens in Marwencol plays out like a movie, a Tarantino-style daydream of wartime revenge. And what happens in Marwencol stays in Marwencol.
No MPAA rating. Plays Fri.-Thu. at the Siskel Film Center. Running time: 1:23.
Michael Phillips, Tribune critic
‘Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer’ 3 1/2 stars
When New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was caught in a scandal involving high-priced call girls in March 2008, the New York Post’s tabloid exuberance expertly captured the public mood of prurient surprise with a front-page headline for the ages: “Ho No! Gov Nailed in Hooker Shock.”
For Spitzer was not just any elected official caught patronizing $1,000-a-night prostitutes. As the state’s attorney general, he had become known as “the sheriff of Wall Street” for his willingness to take on powerful and previously untouchable special interests in the financial world.
Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has delivered a taut and compelling investigation of that scandal and what led to it. Made with the on-camera cooperation of Spitzer (though not his wife), it is a sad, disturbing and in some ways tragic tale that in its lurid combination of sex and politics, banal hypocrisy and bare-knuckles power, seems very much an American story of our times.
As such, it is a particularly good story for Gibney, an Oscar winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side” and responsible for such excellent docs as “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”
Spitzer’s story turns out to have more to it than one would think, to be a more complicated scenario than it looks to be at first. If it has tragic elements, it’s hardly because an innocent was victimized. Though Spitzer was, in Gibney’s words, “a force for good,” he was far from being without sin. Not only did he regularly patronize hookers, but he also had personality traits that left him all but friendless in the face of the enemies he’d made.
Gibney makes a convincing case that the point of the federal investigation that revealed Spitzer’s improprieties was not to punish wrongdoing — he was never charged with any crime — but to gather information that could be leaked and force a resignation. Which is exactly what happened.
To tell this intricate story, Gibney uses conventional and unconventional methods. In a classic documentary coup, for instance, he has gotten four of Spitzer’s key enemies to talk on camera.
But when it turned out that Ashley Dupre was only a one-night stand, Gibney found the woman who was the governor’s regular escort and used her in a debatable way. Since “Angelina” refused to appear on camera, he hired actress Wrenn Schmidt to play her by performing her quoted remarks.
More than that, the first time we see Angelina, we are not told she is an actress. Though this technique is effective, especially because Schmidt does excellent work, its appropriateness in the documentary format remains an open question.
Spitzer, a stranger to introspection, can’t come up with a coherent explanation for the actions that led to what he calls “my downfall.” But he fully accepts responsibility for them. “I did what I did, shame on me,” he says at one point, to which viewers will be tempted to add “and shame on those who greased the wheels of his undoing.”
MPAA rating: R (for some sexual material, nudity and language). Plays Fri.-Thu. at the Siskel Film Center. Running time: 1:57
Kenneth Turan, Tribune Newspapers critic
