Ray Pride

Oscar-winning documentarian Jessica Yu spent five years, off and on, working on her latest labor of love, "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger." A portrait of the late Chicago artist, hermit and repository of rich urban legends, who died in 1973, "Realms" does a frightening thing. Talking to Yu recently, she told me she felt that her two trips to Darger's preserved, moldering, dusty abode, before its 2000 dismantlement, were like "stepping into Darger's mind." One of the several layers of her methodic approach to the mysteries of this self-taught obsessive's teeming mind is to discern how Darger himself viewed that overflowing space, what perspectives he took on the layers and layers of paper detritus that were more loam than rubbish for the making of his troubled visions. Another is a bifurcated narration: Broadway actor Larry Pine intones material from Darger's 15,000-page-plus typewritten manuscript of the stunningly beautiful, deeply disturbing battles of his flocks of "Vivian Girls" against armies and winged creatures and the boundaries of imagination. 8-year-old actress Dakota Fanning reads the "omniscient" narration, in a touch that sounds glib but is in fact oddly ideal. Glimpses of a long-gone Chicago, centered on his longtime apartment near Wrightwood and Lincoln, are buttressed by animations of some of Darger's visions, with seven animators bringing them to fluttery, haunting life. Darger's work defies comprehension more than description, but I leave it to Yu's loving, sometimes wondrous, deeply personal and inquisitive documentary to bring out the fascinating complications of this little-known man's mind. 81m.

"In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger" opens Friday at the Music Box

(2005-01-18)

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