Review: Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal on Wellspring DVD

The disc’s audio is good: Not a single syllable out of Dakota Fanning and Larry Pine’s mouths goes unheard.

In the Realms of the UnrealThe cinematic equivalent of flipping your TV set onto PBS and discovering, say, Tucker Carlson snipping out some of the genuflecting throngs in Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi, taping them to pencil tops, and having them run around shrieking “talk to the hand, bitch,” the corny (and artistically destructive) animated sequences of Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal represent merely the most questionable formal tactic of a deeply cagey and secretive film. Unreal is a specious title for a documentary, especially one as stylistically prosaic as Yu’s pan-and-dissolve, pan-and-dissolve Museum of Natural History throwback, but it’s still appropriate. The willfully elliptical presentation of the life and art of one Henry Darger, author of what could very well be the world’s longest novel (the titular tome comes in at 15,000 pages…though to be fair to all other prospective record-holders, Darger’s hand-written font is about as tall on the page as a thumbnail, and the text is interspersed with a number of illustrations), begins on a note of forced mystery, with the roll call of interview subjects responding to an unheard question with a chorus of “I don’t know.” Then again, given the terrifying evidence on display throughout this Cliffs Notes version of the life and art of Darger, perhaps the ignorance wasn’t selective but a means of social self-defense in the face of the fairly obvious notion that the poor man spent his entire life deflecting off the sort of mental glitches that would inspire him to invent and develop a war-based alternate universe where frequently naked underage girls with penises do battle in the name of God against the heathens called Glandelinians, who are prone to strangling and eviscerating the tots. While clearly too preternaturally prepubescent to be considered borderline pedophiliac, Darger’s art (at least, as it’s portrayed by Yu, deliberately muddying the line between his work and his poverty-stricken and disillusioned ersatz Peter Pan-syndrome waking reality) is an undisciplined amalgamation of blow-up copies of 1930s advertising visions of distaff cherubim, slaughterhouse piety, and watercolored, butterfly-winged apocalypse. If Yu was aiming to portray the schizoid hermit as a four-alarm sex offender in the making, she sold it when she recruited the voiceover “talents” of Satan’s own Dakota Fanning…who, come to think of it, fits right into Darger’s milieu of impossibly self-satisfied baby hermaphrodites fighting in the Name of Our Lord. Amen.

Image/Sound

Image quality is a little sketchy at first (the opening pan across Darger’s work area reveals poor detail), but it’s smooth sailing thereafter: colors are solid, or, rather, the moving animations in the film are very loyal to the muted hues of Darger’s original watercolors. Audio is also good: Not a single syllable out of Dakota Fanning and Larry Pine’s mouths goes unheard.

Extras

A thorough but visually inert interview with director Jessica Yu, a series of storyboards, a photo gallery, filmographies, and trailers for Red Lights, Tarnation, and Milk and Honey.

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Overall

Even if In the Realms of the Unreal doesn’t make you want to save public broadcasting from George W. Bush, please go here and at least save Cookie Monster from getting raped.

Score: 
 Cast: Dakota Fanning, Larry Pine  Director: Jessica Yu  Screenwriter: Jessica Yu  Distributor: Wellspring  Running Time: 82 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Release Date: June 21, 2005  Buy: Video

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