Stylish period piece with a big dollop of syrup
THE last picture by American director Todd Haynes was 2015’s sumptuous-looking lesbian romance Carol, and Wonderstruck contains many of the same stylistic flourishes.
In particular, Haynes treats period detail like a great portrait painter preoccupied with getting the eyes right, and here he has two periods to obsess over, as Wonderstruck tells two stories simultaneously, one set in 1977, the other exactly 50 years earlier.
The film is based on a 2011 novel for young adults by Brian Selznick, who also wrote the screenplay, and whose very name is a throwback to another age . . . he is related to the celebrated Thirties producer David O. Selznick.
His famous forebear would feel right at home in the 1927 setting, which is rendered in black and white and follows a young deaf girl, Rose (delightfully played by hearing-impaired actress Millicent Simmonds, pictured). She lives with her wealthy, but emotionally distant, father in Hoboken, New Jersey, but longs to escape, her imagination kindled by the (silent) movies. She is understandably discombobulated to see that talkies are on their way.
We’ll come back to Rose, as the film does again and again, but really its main protagonist is 12-yearold Ben (Oakes Fegley, also excellent), who in 1977 is living in Minnesota with his aunt, after his librarian mother (a fleeting role for Michelle Williams) has been killed in a car crash.
Ben’s mum never told him anything about his father, but Ben thinks he lives in New York, so sets off to find him. This task would be tricky enough, but to add a further challenge, Ben has lost his hearing following a lightning strike.
From this point on, the lives of Ben, in what might be termed Kojak-era New York, and Rose back in the Jazz Age, run closely in parallel. He is looking for his father, while she is just as keen, for reasons I shouldn’t divulge, to track down a major silent-movie star called Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore).
Gradually, steered either by delightful serendipity or thunderous contrivance, depending on how cynical you are, their parallel lives start to converge. For me, the film flounders and eventually drowns in its own syrupy ambition. But there were plenty of people around me dabbing their eyes.
Certainly, Wonderstruck has some sweet things to say about the imagination of children, especially those who are deaf. And, perhaps ironically, it has a memorable soundtrack, combining Seventies classics (David Bowie’s Space Oddity, The Sweet’s Fox On The Run) with jazz and ragtime.
Haynes has also made his film a kind of visual hymn to New York. Rose and Ben are never more wonderstruck than when they arrive in Manhattan, she stepping off the Hoboken ferry into a monochrome world of flat caps and Model T Fords, and him off a Greyhound bus into a dazzlingly colourful cityscape, full of thieves and derelicts and, that thumping Seventies cliche, black kids playing under a gushing fire hydrant.
So the picture has plenty of pleasures, but in attempting to manipulate the audience as he manipulates his characters, Haynes overdoes it. I believed in everything except the story.