Review - In The Realms Of The Unreal

Henry Darger's personal life was a bore. He never got married; he lived alone and spoke with hardly anyone, and then he died. The documentary on his life and work, In The Realms of the Unreal, had somewhat of an uphill battle it faced, then, since the man lived to 81 but hardly anyone spoke to him for most of his life.

How do you find people to talk about a man who kept completely to himself, and whose work was only discovered once dead? How do you relate this sort of life to an audience without boring them to tears?

Darger's work is fascinating, so the filmmakers focus on that. They animate it even, which I found a bit... much. I guess it's how they decided to get the all-encompassing world Darger created with his paintings and complementary stories - turn it into a sort of cartoon for long sections of the film. I just... I dunno, Darger probably would've loved it, but I kept being irritated that we were seeing his work fluttering and running about; I wanted to see his work sit still for a second or two, you know?

There are insights to be had, though the viewer can only piece together what we're presented with to make our judgements on Darger and his obsessive little world. I kept waiting for someone to say, "The man went to mass three times a day and never spoke to any children ever because he was crippled by the conflict of his religious fervor and his pedophiliac tendencies." No one came out and said that, but the bits and pieces of his life are presented to us so it seems fairly obvious.

And whomever decided to have Elfin-Empress Dakota Fanning narrate the tale of a man who painted a world of little blond girls with penises? A genius.

Check out Darger's work. It's really creepy, and really beautiful. If you do like his work then you'll want to check out the film; otherwise the film's a bit staid and, like I said, Darger's hermitic life does not lend itself easily to an hour and a half of observation. The film does make a clear point to show that people really knew nothing about him; each person they speak with (landlady, neighbor) ends up conflicting the other person's impression completely.

He's an enigma, that Darger chap. Him and his faerie hermaphrodite minxes.