Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County, Joyce had Dublin, and Henry Darger had a small apartment in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Henry Darger, the subject of the new documentary playing at The Charles, In the Realms of the Unreal, lived the life of a recluse and outsider artist. Sequestered in his room, turned off from the reality of the outside world, and over the course of a lifetime, he developed a literary and artistic world so complex that it can only be described with the same adjective its title suggests, unreal.
Shortly after his birth in Chicago in 1892, Darger's mother passed away and his sister was put in a foster home. For a short period during his childhood, Darger lived in Chicago with his sick father, who eventually died in a poor house where Darger himself would, years later, live and die. After the death of his father, Darger was placed in a detention hall in southern Illinois for juveniles who were diagnosed with mental problems, though he soon ran away only to find himself back in Chicago working as a janitor.
Almost immediately after he moved back to Chicago, Darger began his life work, a colossal novel over 15,000 pages long entitled The Realms of the Unreal. Darger also began working to perfect a style of collage and composition which has made him one of the most interesting and respected outsider artists. The documentary is written and directed by Jessica Yu, who has written for television shows such as West Wing and ER, and narrated by munchkin Dakota Fanning (I am Sam, Uptown Girls).
The beauty of Yu's documentary involves her direction and use of animation to bring Darger's paintings to life. The stop animation somehow perfectly fits Dargers' art, as if in no other way could we conceive of it being brought to life; the drama of his life pans out in the drama of his work and we are passive observers, listening to a life presented like a children's book, illustration by illustration and page by page. Instead of taking the giant technological leaps that have made animation frighteningly lifelike, Yu adopts a different (and certainly cheaper) approach. And yet somehow, when Darger writes of the war between two countries, the battle seems more vivid, more terrible, and ironically more silly, repugnant, and childlike because of it.
But at times the movie seems crude and reductive - rather than investigate and dwell on the complexities of both Darger's character and his art, Yu changes the subject. Darger's pedophilic proclivity and other oddities of his character are treated as eccentricities worth citing but never dwelling on. The movie drops hints that Darger has an odd view of sexuality. We are led to believe that his little girls each have a penis, and that they wield guns and fight in battle. But Yu leaves it at that - nothing more is given. Are we to assume that everyone is at a loss to describe or understand Darger? The movie would have his views on God, sex, violence and morality all become a sort of abstract pastiche and the effect, sadly is that they all seem pasted on, and the illusion falls apart.
Yu should be congratulated for an epic achievement - that is, creating a life, or a character sketch from interviews with the handful of people that knew Darger. If the movie nevertheless fails, and I think it does, it is because Yu skirted away from asking or answering any difficult questions. What we are left with is a nice, illuminating, and very well done museum-style run-of-the-mill biopic.
