'In the Realms of the Unreal' - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

'In the Realms of the Unreal': Strange, wonderful, discomfiting

By CATHERINE FOX
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Throughout his sad and difficult life, Henry Darger was a cipher.

He eked out a living doing menial jobs. Except for attending Mass, he stayed in his one-room Chicago apartment. No family. No friends. Odd and awkward, he could barely carry on a conversation.

Diorama Films

'In the Realms of the Unreal'

The verdict: Though sometimes patronizing, the film conveys the singular art and psyche of outsider artist Henry Darger.

Director: Jessica Yu
Starring: Henry Darger, Dakota Fanning, Larry Pine
Run time: 81 minutes
Release date: December 22, 2004
Rating: Not rated
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It was only after he died in 1973, and his landlords went to clean his room, that anyone discovered that he was a remarkable artist. A man with a rich and roiling inner life, he left behind a 15,000-page illustrated manuscript, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."

In her simultaneously fascinating and irritating film, documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu reconstructs Darger's life and immerses the viewer in his idiosyncratic and compelling art, now prized by museums and collectors.

Born in Chicago in 1892 and parentless at 8, Darger ran away from an asylum and built a world in the tiny apartment he occupied for 40 years.

Yu, who had the opportunity to film his lair before it was dismantled, establishes his singularity as she lingers lovingly over children's watercolor paints, balls of string, devotional pictures, papers piled so high on his bed that he had to sleep in a chair. Interviews with neighbors reveal how little anyone knew about him, to the point of uncertainty as to how to pronounce his name.

The camera pans over the drawings, some mural size, with which Darger had illustrated his epic tale of good and evil, as a narrator reads the text. Villains wearing mortarboards and Daniel Boone raccoon caps battle to crush the rebellion led by little girls out of '40s coloring books, who, when naked, reveal penises.

The fantastical landscapes of the battlegrounds are hardly Eden. The story includes gory dismemberment and torture. It's easy to see it as a Freudian allegory for Darger's warring id and superego, and an outlet for a weird sexuality.

This stuff is strange and wonderful, creepy and discomfiting in its own right. Unfortunately, Yu doesn't trust her material. How else to explain the decision to animate Darger's narrative paintings. Whatever her intentions, it's demeaning and suggests the stereotypical equation of outsider artists with children. Would she make a cartoon out of "The Last Supper?" Pulling the Vivian Girls out of the narrative to walk through Chicago streets is a particularly lame move.

Using child actor Dakota Fanning to read Darger's words — a conceit for his arrested development? — is similarly insulting, especially when his writings reveal such a lively, complex adult mind.

Miraculously, the movie succeeds anyway. Yu penetrates the carapace of Darger's public persona to expose the need for love and hurt locked in what he called the "casket of my heart." In the end, his remarkable imagination conquers all. Like van Gogh, this tragic, lonely soul gave birth to wondrous, singular art.