A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Wonderstruck features contrasting versions of NYC as its secret star
Reading Brian Selznick’s script based on the author’s 2011 novel Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes saw not only a movie in the making but a way of making a movie.
“He had already started to consider things from such a visually cinematic point of view,” Haynes said in a recent interview, “and also one that really considered sound. It was clearly this sort of cinematic fever dream that I felt would require all creative hands on deck in a way that was exhilarating.”
Cinematic fever dream is an apt description of the American filmmaker’s latest feature, which premièred in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Following the parallel and ultimately intertwining narratives of two deaf children, each on a lifechanging pilgrimage to New York City 50 years apart, the film is a swirl of audio-visual stimulation.
Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds plays Rose, a New Jersey girl in 1927 who is obsessed with a famous actress (Julianne Moore); Oakes Fegley is Ben, an orphaned Minnesota boy who, bereft at the loss of his mother (Michelle Williams), sets off in search of his father.
Haynes turned to silent cinema in telling Rose’s story, highlighting his young actress’s expressive face in mostly wordless scenes, using intertitles and cranking up the drama at key moments.
He took a different tack with Ben, who finds himself in the gritty, groovy, colour-saturated New York of the 1970s. Yet even in these scenes, the scant dialogue is almost superfluous.
“Silent cinema was definitely the place I started, as research in terms of style, ideas and lyrical considerations for how to set a story in the ’20s, and also how much we would differentiate in terms of style between Rose’s story and Ben’s story,” Haynes said. “There are differences, but I didn’t want them just to be academic differences like using different aspect ratios. It was more about letting Rose’s story be told from the outside in, and Ben’s from the inside out.
“I mean that Rose is a central character in the film but we’re not reliant on strictly point-of-view shots to describe her experiences. We see her in the frame as a witness to wonders, where she often lands in the corner of the frame. We see the look in her eyes, her gaze, but also her body as part of her environment.
“Ben sometimes disappears in the movie, as the camera goes inside his head to what he sees. It plays on the fog of subjectivity and different modes of filmmaking. I use more zoom lenses in Ben’s story, longer lenses, slow motion. And I use sound more as a subject, which at times almost evaporates the silence, playing with what we might expect of somebody who just lost their hearing.”
The past is a recurring theme in his films. Velvet Goldmine (1998) is set in the glam-rock heyday of Britain in the 1970s; Far From Heaven (2002) posits Julianne Moore as a housewife in 1950s America; I’m Not There (2007) is an impressionistic take on the life of Bob Dylan; while Carol (2015) returns to the 1950s to explore a lesbian romance.
With Wonderstruck, he timetravels in two ways, revisiting decades gone by while returning to the wide-eyed, sometimes difficult years of childhood.
“Both these kids faced real challenges in their lives,” Haynes said, “things left untold that become their personal missions to answer. That means they have to leave the places they grew up and venture out into the unknown, and we follow them on this path of selfdiscovery.”
The secret star of the film is the mystical conglomeration of concrete, skyscrapers, museums, blood, sweat and ambition that is the Big Apple. It’s a place he knows well, where he moved in the 1980s after earning a degree in arts and semiotics from Brown University, immersing himself in the city’s thriving independent film scene.
“(Wonderstruck) is like this double-vision of New York City, with a 50-year gap, that seems to describe two cities that are the antithesis of each other,” he said. “One is at the height of economic productivity and growth, the other is at its most economically fraught and near bankruptcy. But it’s a city that endures.”
It is not by chance that both narratives wind their way to the Museum of Natural History. He also brings up a Robert Moses-commissioned scale model of the city, created for the 1964 World’s Fair.
“In a weird way, it’s like the city telling its own story is the way it endures,” he said. “The museums and the representations and reexaminations of the self, almost putting oneself into these little containers of meaning and narrative.
“That’s the way it survives and also the way the kids survive, by figuring out their own stories.”