A Wacky " Wrinkle in Time"

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, American

Let me start off by saying that I'm very familiar with Madeleine L'Engle's book, "A Wrinkle in Time."  It was one of my favorites growing up. It is an exceedingly weird and very earnestly corny children's book, where one of the characters is a literal "happy medium," and the heroine wins by using the power of love to save her brother.  It's not exactly easy material to adapt, especially in 2018. There's already been one terrible adaptation, the 2003 TV movie. And after the awful reviews and audience reaction, I wasn't expecting much from Ava Duvernay's version.

But I didn't dislike it.  Yes, the movie is pretty ineptly made.  There are some very odd adaptation and editing choices, with important bits of story and exposition excised for no discernable reason - including the vital scene that explains what a "tesseract" is.  The concepts of space travel and the spread of evil in the universe are ludicrous as presented, action scenes are shoehorned in at regular intervals, and there's the constant feeling of the whole film being absolutely smothered in expensive CGI effects.  In fact, the whole film is quite a bit more tolerable if you simply ignore the story and just enjoy the spectacle for its own sake.

And yet, the film actually gets the major parts of the book right.  Troubled teenager Meg Murray (Storm Reid), her precocious younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and Meg's classmate Calvin (Levi Mller) are taken on an adventure, hopping through the galaxy via tesseract (a wrinkle in space-time) with three cosmic beings, Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey).  They're going to retrieve Meg and Charles Wallace's father, Alex Murray (Chris Pine), who disappeared after a tesseract experiment, and is now the prisoner of an evil force called IT.

The cast has been purposefully diversified, so Meg is the product of African-American and Caucasian parents, her brother is Filipino and adopted, and the Mrs. Ws reflect a bit of everything.  However, Meg is recognizably Meg, a broody, low self-esteem oddball who can't help acting out. Storm Reid is excellent in the part, coming across as perfectly emotionally genuine in even the most ridiculous circumstances.  Reese Witherspoon also stands out as a cheerfully nutty Mrs. Whatsit, who wanders into the Murray household draped in sheets. Deric McCabe, alas, is rather plasticine as Charles Wallace, but it's an impossible role, and I'm actually impressed that they got it anywhere close to right.

Of course, for as much as the bones of the story are there, it is often hard to tell with so much distracting visual madness heaped on top.  The Mrs. Ws are given ostentatious costumes that change with every new leg of the journey. Oprah gets the wildest look, with thick, glitter-encrusted makeup and her hair sculpted into a variety of massive polyhedrons.  The three planets that our heroes visit present the opportunity for lots of strange alien landscapes, one populated by colorful flying plants, and another by sinister synchronized suburbanites. One important confrontation randomly takes place on a crowded summer beach.  Sadly, these locations come and go too quickly, often feeling like random jaunts into whimsy without much weight.

The production design is great, and it's almost worth watching the film for the trippy sensory overload alone.  However, there's really no excuse for the narrative being as incoherent as it is, full of wonky chunks of mythology that don't suggest any kind of internal logic at work.  Occasionally you get a clever line of dialogue or a particularly creative image that hints at something more, though. And these are what keep me from writing off the movie completely.  I remember watching and being fond of many similarly nonsensical fantasy films as a child. And "A Wrinkle in Time" wasn't made for me, but for younger, and perhaps more forgiving audiences.          

Adapting "A Wrinkle in Time" would have been a tall order for anyone, and Ava Duvernay was clearly out of her depth tackling this as her first genre project.  The movie is in no way a success, but it's so weirdly memorable and strangely loyal to the book that I'm having a hard time thinking of it as a failure either.  The people who made this film clearly cared about what they were doing, and it shows.

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