A Wrinkle in Time (2D)

Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Rating: PG
Director: Ava DuVernay

Quick Impressions:
I’m a huge fan of Madeleine L’Engle. My mother first read A Wrinkle in Time to me when I was in third grade after she happened across the paperback in a thrift store. We were spellbound by the Murrays’ adventures across spacetime and finished the book quickly.

“Isn’t that an amazing story!” I remember my mother marvelling. “And you know, I don’t think she ever wrote anything else!”

But she was wrong, of course, because, as we soon learned L’Engle had actually written ten hundred thousand million books (just an estimate that’s probably well short of the true figure), and before long, we had read them all. Well, maybe not all. I mean, we started in 1987, (about thirty years after did), and she was still writing books right up to her death twenty years later in 2007. L’Engle was astonishingly prolific, and though I love her work, I don’t think I’ve read everything. (I’ve read a lot, though.)

A Wrinkle in Time is my second favorite book of her Time Quintent (which was a quartet for the longest time. I’m actually a huge fan of Many Waters and a bit disappointed that this film project clearly won’t launch a series that includes that story since 1) The movie doesn’t seem to be doing so well and 2) This version completely erases the existence of Meg’s other brothers, the twins Sandy and Dennys who are the protagonists of that fourth book.

I’ve been very nervous about this movie for quite some time. Of course, I wanted to see it. I prepared by reading the book aloud to my own daughter who is coincidentally in third grade. We only made it to The Happy Medium before the movie came out, though, because my son is two and a less patient listener. (He was extremely interested in Fortinbras and the kitten, and he did keep repeating all of Meg’s impassioned interjections, trying to unravel the puzzle of her emotions. But he was sorely disappointed by the lack of illustrations and ultimately became very noisy.)

To me, the theatrical trailers for A Wrinkle in Time  did not inspire great confidence. Neither did the fact that no previous screen adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time I’ve seen has been any good. Of these, the old film strip that my third grade teacher showed to our class (after I talked up the book incessantly) was the least bad but hardly cinematic.

I counterbalanced these concerns with the obvious positives of the project. Director Ava DuVernay’s Selma was a really good (if slightly uneven) film. That scene of the little girls in the stairwell before the church blows up is heart-breaking and brilliant. Also, though not at all the way I’ve always imagined Mrs Whatsit, Reese Witherspoon has risen immeasurably in my estimation recently. I never disliked her, but I so admire the way she makes interesting work for herself and for other women. And Oprah and Mrs Which? That’s a match made in heaven! I cannot imagine an actress more perfect for that role than Oprah Winfrey. Mrs Which is so out of the ordinary, and Oprah can make being out of the ordinary look preferable like no one else. And I mean, sometimes when Disney pours money into a movie, it works. So I was cautiously optimistic.

But, of course, because we waited until Sunday afternoon to take our (two older) kids, I couldn’t help hearing the negative word of mouth.

Going in, I felt so nervous. Then my nine-year-old observed, “It’s made by Disney, and their movies are always good.” I found that quite reassuring, that reminder that she and I perhaps judge films quite differently.

The Good:
I read a comment on an ad for this movie in my Facebook feed that said, “A Wrinkle in Time is not that bad. I saw it on a plane, and only a few people walked out.”

Okay, it’s not as bad as that.

Some things about the film do work, and my nine-year-old liked it enough that she wants her tenth birthday party to have an A Wrinkle in Time theme. (She always plans these things well in advance, though, and will probably change her mind five or six time before next January).

Storm Reid is good. She’s really pretty perfect as Meg. What she’s given to work with isn’t always ideal, but the actress captures the essence of the character. Her performance is probably a sign that A) She works well with director Ava DuVernay and B) She’s talented with a lot of potential. I’ll definitely watch for her future projects.

Actually, the whole Murray family is good. (I wish we’d gotten a peek at Sandy and Dennys, but I understand the convenience of cutting them.  I mean, if you’re only doing the first story, why include them?)

Gugu Mbatha-Raw makes a great Dr. Murray (though I wish we’d gotten a scene of her cooking dinner out in her lab), and Chris Pine is perfect as the other Dr. Murray (whose role in the story gets dumbed down and all but removed).

As Charles Wallace, young Deric McCabe seems merely servicable in the beginning, but as we get further into the story, his performance gets better and better until he’s pretty magnifient in the Camazotz scenes. It’s got to be tough to find a good Charles Wallace, and McCabe does a great job here.

Now the other performances are trickier for me to evaluate because many characters have been slightly reconceived for the film.

For example, when I read the book, I do not imagine Mrs Whatsit as being anything at all like Reese Witherspoon. But clearly all three of the Mrses have been reimagined here. So I tend to think that Mrs Whatsit should be older, and a presence who is more reassuring than combative. (But then again, while the reader finds her sympathetic, Meg is intrinsically suspicious of her even in the book.)

In the book, Mrs Whatsit is the one who seems most approachable to the children, and Mrs Which is the most strange and Other. But Oprah’s Mrs Which is consistently calming and approachable and easy to understand.

None of these three actresses gives a bad performance (though all of them are given some odd things to say and do).

My husband has not read the book (somehow). He said that Mrs Whatsit was his favorite character in the movie, and he loved Witherspoon’s performance.

I agree that Witherspoon really makes the most of the material she’s given. Her Mrs Whatsit is a delight. (I like the way she delivers, “Wild nights are my glory!” She dials up the crazy and manages to convey to us that she has not been a human for very long.) Of course, she’s also frustrating for me because she’s playing a character who isn’t really the character from the book.

Now movie Mrs Who I actually like a bit better than her counterpart in the book. I’m probably in the minority here, but I find book Mrs Who extremely aggravating, especially if you’re trying to read aloud to someone else, because she’s constantly delivering quotations in foreign languages, sometimes in other alphabets and everything.  Mindy Kaling’s Mrs Who is less annoying than book Mrs Who although I do think she should have worn her glasses. She also needs a better mix of quotes. It’s fine that she uses more recent, pop culture references, as that is what someone would do when genuinely trying to communicate through quotation. But I wish she would also mix in more quotations from other eras when those are most apt to express certain ideas. I mean, she sits all day in a room surrounded by stacks of books, so she can toss out OutKast lyrics? Maybe they should have depicted her as listening to an iPod and let her give Meg a pair of headphones. I feel like the reinvention of the character didn’t go far enough, leaving her design a bit muddled.  But I do like Kaling’s portrayal of this reimagined Mrs Who, and I think all her cool handshakes with Calvin work well in the context of a character who wishes to communicate but finds verbalizing her ideas difficult.

As I said earlier, Oprah seems destined to play Mrs Which.  Making her so warm and approachable seems like a mistake, but since the movie plays up Mrs Whatsit’s Puckish side instead of making her the one who speaks reassuringly to the children, I guess that sort of works. But not really.

As far as the other performances go, Zach Galifianakis is charming as the Happy Medium. I like his bit about “people clothes,” though why the movie doesn’t go farther and actually disclose Mrs Whatsit’s background, I can’t imagine.

And Rowan Blanchard is good as that beloved A Wrinkle in Time staple Veronica (??!). I’m not sure they needed to add this character (because now it looks like Meg is being bullied by one mean girl instead of at odds with the entire town). But our family watched Girl Meets World, and I like Rowan Blanchard.

Another thing the movie does well is look cool. Admittedly, it almost goes overboard here. The results are kind of trippy. At the beginning of the film, the sci-fi “wrinkled” version of the Disney logo prompted our fifteen-year-old to say to his dad, “Disney Inception.”  Five seconds later, he and my husband turned to face each other and said mystically in unison, “Disception.”

The bright, vibrant colors and supersaturation fit with Disney’s usual live action color scheme for spring releases. (Think the recent Alice movies and that Oz one with James Franco.)

The costumes and make-up of Whatsit, Who, and Which are eye-catching. My daughter was especially taken with Mrs Which’s sparkly lipstick. “Her lips are sparkling a different color in every scene,” she said. “I think she’s too obsessed with lipstick. Her character is basically lipstick.” But Mrs Which is supposed to shimmer, after all.

My daughter also had a lot to say about Mrs Whatsit’s transformation. “Why did she turn into a flying asparagus?”

Why indeed?

But her transformation in the book is sort of weird and incongruous and unsettling. At least the flying asparagus ray is pretty. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her before in the Fantasia 2000 version of “The Firebird.”

The movie also has a nice moral, a positive message for young people that cannot possibly be missed. I mean, you could be texting through the whole movie or even simultaneously watching a different film on your phone, and you’d still get the point. This version of A Wrinkle in Time is not subtle.

Best Scene:
I like Storm Reid’s scene on Camazotz with Chris Pine. Much comes together in that moment, and both Reid and Pine give excellent and moving performances. Unfortunately just after this scene, the movie completely falls apart.

Best Action Sequence:
I actually don’t like most of the action sequences. It is fun to watch Meg and Veronica’s showdown on the basketball court. “Okay,” I thought. “I can see why they’re doing it this way. For a movie, it’s better to dramatize these events so we can see them on screen. And I see why they’re making Meg’s main adversary this girl Veronica. And I can see why Charles Wallace is also at school, speaking up in front of everybody…”

This was early in the film, when I could still see why they were doing things.

Best Scene Visually:
Uriel is pretty, as I’ve already mentioned.  This film also does a great job with the bouncing ball scene on Camazotz.

The Negatives:
There’s a moment when Dr. Murray listens to his wife singing to his son and whispers in frenzied triumph, “Love is the frequency,” or something to that effect. (Maybe it’s, “Love is the vibration.”)

At any rate, that seemed ridiculously cheesy and heavy-handed to me.

“This is as bad as Elsa suddenly discovering that love is the key to melting the ice and controlling her powers at the end of Frozen,” I thought.

And then in the end credits I discovered that Jennifer Lee (who wrote Frozen) also wrote this screenplay with Jeff Stockwell.

Lee has written some great stuff for Disney, screenplays for Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph, the story for Zootopia. Obviously she’s a good writer.

But this screenplay is terrible.

Now that might not be entirely her fault. As I’ve been re-reading A Wrinkle in Time with my daughter, I’ve had the thought several times that the novel may be uncinematic or at least difficult to adapt for the screen.

For one thing, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962. In many ways, it’s ahead of its time, but in some other, fundamental ways, it’s very much a product of its time. Madeleine L’Engle was a genius at blending cutting edge science, real American life, and vaguely Christian mysticism in her fiction. Nearly sixty years later, that science is old hat, and American life has changed.

To reach children and teens living today, this film version changes the setting and tries to update the characters and their culture. It also glosses over the science behind the tesseract since the idea of tessering or using wormholes or whatever has now been done to death in science fiction. The mysticism still works.

So the basic problem I see is that this film keeps the mysticism and some of the morals of the original story, but tries to replace (or enhance) the other two elements. But then ultimately it fails to replace them with any convincing updated version. So we’re left with poorly drawn supporting characters, a vague setting, and a rushed explanation of the science as if the details don’t matter.

The morals and the mysticism come through loud and clear (maybe a little too loud and clear). It’s like halfway through, A Wrinkle in Time stops being a dramatic story and instead becomes a motivational speech, encouraging people to believe in themselves, embrace their flaws, reject the darkness, and love one another.

And you’re watching, thinking, “Yes, this is a very noble message, but isn’t there supposed to be a plot wrapped around it?”

It’s like the movie forgets to tell the literal story and focuses entirely on the lead character’s inner journey.

Some little differences are forgivable. Novels have to be adapted to work on the screen, after all.

But whoever made the decision to oversimplify the plot and leave out crucial story elements made a huge mistake.

When Mrs Which explains the darkness to Meg on Uriel, things begin to go wrong, and then the movie gets worse and worse from there. Why does the movie dumb down and reduce the plot so much?

Then when Dr. Murray shows his journey and gives a shout out to Aunt Beast, I thought, “Oh great! They’re throwing that in there just for fans. That means they’re going to leave out that part of the story.”

And they do.