Great Film overall

Excellent adaptation.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

To say this film is good is like saying water is wet. The director has brought to the world a story everyone should not just see...but one you should pay close attention to.At the end of this film you might come away with a sense of..."what if?" By this I mean what if not a soul payed attention to me.Henry Darger was a lonely soul throughout his life. I got the impression he was lonely...by design. He couldn't deal with people because early on in his life he had such difficulties as a child that he figured why deal with real people. How bout I create my own world. This is what he did...and what he did is visually stunning and mentally stimulating. In a basic sense I mean he created some outstanding paintings and oh yeah, there are written stories to go along with each panting. The stories are beyond any Sci-fi fantasy. These are just pure make believe that he actually believed in.Pure innocence is a rarity in the world anymore. If you wanna see some, watch this film and be prepared to cry and be amazed. I know I was.Thank you Jessica Yu.

A documentary about a hermitic janitor, who upon his death at age 82, leaves his landlords and neighbors to discover his life's work of several hundred paintings, some well over twelve feet long, and a fifteen thousand page book(one of the longest novels in history), all revolving around a children's story called "In The Realms Of The Unreal". The book is about seven sisters named the Vivian sisters who battle a wicked, "Godless", country of child enslaving men, with the help of a good Christian nation. Really moving, tragic, and inspiring. A human drama about the extreme isolation of the artist. A remarkable story, told through beautiful and wonderous art work.

This "documentary" is a blatant attempt to contribute to and fester the 'myth' of Henry Darger, a reclusive, backward man who concocted a trite and repetitive story (18,000 pages) filled with extreme inconsistencies (his "Christian" army is involved in bloody warfare - tenets of Christ were those of a pacifist, etc) and sadomasochistic tendencies. It seems he lived in his own sullied world, formed mostly by an extreme fascination with children and the sufferings of Christ (he had upon his wall 13,000 representations of crucifixes). His landlords found his room after he died, stuffed with innumerable articles of junk, stacks of wet papers, hairballs, empty bottles and yet, being artists and entrepreneurs themselves, they hatched a theme to create Henry Darger as a genius of 'outsider art', their attempts succeeded, Darger's immature works, mostly traced drawings, slapped on with some vivid color schemata, in every sense lacking any cohesive aesthetic, have sold for millions now.The room itself was photographed, cataloged and inducted into the 'folk art' hall of fame. Darger was seemingly a lunatic, at odds with his warped Christian conditioning and society itself, he would hide in his room for hours on end, lusting after children and cut out articles and trace faces onto pieces of toilet paper (he was poor). There's no doubt that he holds some fascination for us, mainly because of his weirdness but eventually even that is usurped by the painstaking tediousness and forcefulness of accepting such unworthy levels of art into our consciousness, as this documentary begs us to do.Since he is dead, he can not speak for himself, and thus, his 'myth' is assured, bringing the curious to worship at his feet and sell his works for staggering prices.

I believe, upon seeing this film, that Henry Darger was an autistic savant, and that his life and artistic work stand as a monument to understanding the condition of the autistic personality, particularly the personality of the autistic savant.An autistic person suffers from a certain amount of confusion in the thought process. They usually have some problems communicating with others. Sometimes they say or do things that they don't mean. They might get work orders confused, and not know it. They might suddenly change subjects during conversation without warning and be unaware of it. The problem is that they are completely unaware that they did something other than what they thought they did, or that they changed the subject of conversation without knowing it.When this confusion arises, arguments follow, because the autistic person is so often unaware of the problem he or she is having (Henry got into arguments with his Nun employers at the hospital, where he was a janitor, over chores he was assigned which he may have failed to complete through an autistic mental lapse, while thinking he had completed them.) Temper tantrums arise due to the process of frustration that occurs when these mental lapses or episodes of confusion happen. The autistic person isn't really being "tempermental". The autistic person is truly being surprised by these events of their own misunderstanding, and may sincerely feel mistreated by those who complain about them.A self-activated tape recorder may help autistic people understand how others are perceiving their conversation and behavior.Autistic people do not always find it easy to communicate with others. Henry Darger spent a lot of time alone, creating a fantasy world out of his wishes to communicate. The phenomenon of the savant has been described as what sometimes develops when an autistic person can focus all their mental energy on a single well of thought and perception. In such cases, it is believed that the whole activity of the brain centers on a single slice of life. This phenomenon is well marked in cases of musical prodigies who have severe autism, so that they could not have been taught music, but learned it spontaneously when circumstance provided them with the proper combination of tools, such as access to both a radio - and a piano.Henry Darger was not terribly abnormal. His was a rather mild case of autism. But he was truly a savant, I believe. There are many people who have mild cases of autism. Some of them may be savants too. Thanks to Henry Darger and this film, their circumstances may more easily come to light, and be better understood.