"When you're poor, they call you crazy; when you're rich, you're eccentric." So recites one of 3 former neighbors (and apathetic friends) of one Henry Darger, a shut-in Chicago novelist who may have written America's longest, most fantastic literary self-examination. Writer/director and documentarian Jessica Yu (The Living Museum, American Dreams) attempts to breathe life into another obscure artist, as with 1998's Living Museum, in which patient/artists residing at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York showcase their in-house gallery. Her 2004 effort brings us west, to the then budding metropolis called Chicago.
Darger's magnum opus, and the central theme of the film, began to materialize for him around the time he left the military and secured his first apartment in 1930. The culmination of Darger's suppressed, stunted childhood is a grandiose performance of the author's life and personal struggles; a fiction/fantasy tale of seven young girls named The Vivian Girls (as in part of its full title: 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). The Girls live at the epicenter of an epic revolt against adults that enslave children; a tale derived directly from Darger's own childhood living at an institution in Lincoln, Illinois. This "state farm" was in essence a working farm for children with strict rules and ten-hour working days where beatings were handed out regularly.
The book consumed a major part of the final 40 years of Darger's life, with most writings outside his massive "15,000-page" tome turning out to be less than interesting. One of which is a 10-year, daily chronicle of weather observations so as to rebuke the accuracy of a Chicago weather forecaster. In the end, it's Darger's wildly inventive and eclectic illustrations, which accompany his epic story, that makes this story what it is. The film is definitely worth a look, and is in line with more publicized documentaries like Devil and Daniel Johnston.
