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In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

Posted By: Someonelse

Date: 12 Jul 2021 01:03:33

SD / DVD IMDb

Director: Jessica Yu
Stars: Henry Darger, Dakota Fanning, Larry Pine

Henry Darger worked all his life in menial jobs in Chicago. Living alone and in poverty, he had no friends or close family. Spending all his off hours alone, he whiled away the hours working on a 15,000 page illustrated novel called The Realms of the Unreal. A stunning amalgam of religious imagery, fantasy, and heroic drama, the work was only discovered after Darger was moved to a hospital during the last days of his life. Darger also wrote journals and an autobiography. The documentary uses interviews with Darger's neighbors and narration of passages from his works, along with his illustrations, to explore the mind and work of Henry Darger.

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If you're making a documentary about Henry Darger, it's probably tempting to fill every nook and cranny of the film with found objects and watercolor characters, just as the man himself filled his apartment with clippings and sketches. Jessica Yu takes the bait as she delves into the life of this reclusive janitor who, unbeknownst to his small circle of acquaintances, spent his evenings alone in his room, for decades, creating an epic tale of good versus evil, typewritten on 15,000 pages and illustrated on huge sheets of cheap butcher paper.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

But a documentary on Chaplin doesn't need to be silent and a documentary on Pavarotti doesn't need to be sung. In the Realms of the Unreal might have served its subject better if Yu hadn't tried so hard to give it the same form as Darger's work. After a quick introduction, Yu plunges headlong into a cacophony of voices and a jumble of lightly animated close-ups, and by moving in so close so quickly, she never evokes the breathtaking feeling that Darger's landlords say they felt when they walked into their tenant's room in the last days of his life and discovered his mammoth creation. Yu loses that sense of scale by blowing all of the images up to the same size, and, except for a few fascinating glimpses at how Darger used tracings from newspapers, she loses detail by constantly panning and zooming over his paintings, as if she feels a need to fight for our attention.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

She interviews Darger's neighbors and has some fun with their contradictory statements — Henry always sat in the front, middle, or back of the church, depending on whom you ask — and she avoids talking with any experts who might offer a diagnosis, from afar, of this strange man who was preoccupied with the safety of little girls. She wisely leaves him something of a mystery. But even if that decision seems prudent, she takes on the far more ambitious task of guessing how Darger saw the world. When Yu's animators cut characters from Darger's paintings and make them walk through archival footage of Chicago, any real curiosity about the man, and any respect for his work, seems to have been set aside in favor of movement for its own sake. The camera is all too eager to swim in the artist's sea, but it might have revealed more if it had paused to let our imaginations provide the movement, as Darger's presumably did.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

Despite all that he left behind, or maybe because of it, Henry Darger is an enigma, and any movie about him will have a number of overlapping stories to tell — the ones he lived, the ones he invented, and the ones that fall somewhere in between. But the color in these stories comes from the oddness of the man at the center. Any attempts to embellish them just seem to get in the way.
Errata

SCREENED AT THE 2004 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: "In the Realms of the Unreal" is the name of the 15,000-page children's fantasy novel written by Chicago janitor Henry Darger, who left it among his things when he died in 1973 at the age of 81. The title is borrowed for Jessica Yu's uncommonly interesting and lovely documentary about Darger and his work.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

Darger himself seemed to dwell in an unreal realm, as documented in the other major written work he left behind, his life story. He had a Dickensian childhood, more or less orphaned, sent to a home for "feeble-minded children" (which he doesn't appear to have been) and made to do menial labor on work farms. As an adult, he was reclusive and a devout Catholic. He wanted to be left alone. He never married. The hundreds of paintings he did to accompany his book suggest he had a limited knowledge of the opposite sex: The children are often painted naked, and the little girls have penises.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

Coming from other minds, this would be creepy and unsettling. But Yu's interviews with the people who dealt with Darger – his landlords, his neighbors, and so forth – reveal a man universally considered innocent and child-like. He was naive, maybe a little feeble-minded after all, and had no prurient interests of any kind, at least not of which he left behind any evidence.

Was he crazy? Probably at least slightly. For 10 years, he kept a detailed journal of the weather, comparing it with the forecasts. He seemed angry that the meteorologists got it wrong so often. This is not the behavior of a non-crazy person.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

What makes the film so fascinating is its dual stories: one, of Darger himself, and two, of his "In the Realms of the Unreal" novel. His colorful paintings are animated a bit to give them life and whimsy, and the story itself is a simple, charming piece about a band of seven little girls who lead a fight against an evil warlike nation.

In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

It parallels his real life, too, which gives it poignancy. Did Darger miss his own lost childhood and write this story as a means of recapturing it? It would appear so, though Yu takes the interesting tack of NOT interviewing any psychologists or experts. This is refreshing, as it allows Darger and his work to remain pure, untainted by analysis or dissection. (This is a man who wrote thousands of pages with no intention of anyone ever reading them, much less having them put under a microscope.) He was child-like, his writing was unpolished and quaint, and both are preserved in this gratifying, poignant documentary.
eFilmcritic