Exquisite trip into the recesses of childhood
Wonderstruck
PG cert, 116 min
Dir Todd Haynes Starring Oakes Fegley, Millicent Simmonds, Julianne Moore, Cory Michael Smith, Michelle Williams, James Urbaniak, Damian Young, Patrick Murney
The intertwined subjects of Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck – deafness and growing up – were addressed in a call-to-action recently in the Oscar-winning short The Silent Child. Trust Haynes, though, to fashion those subjects into art.
Based on the graphic novel by Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck centres on Ben (Oakes Fegley), a forlorn 12-year-old living in Minnesota in 1977. His mother (Michelle Williams), has recently died, leaving him a de facto orphan, since his father fled years before. Ben runs away to find him but is also, without knowing it, following in the footsteps of a teenage girl from 50 years ago.
Rose (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf and alone, and in black and white, and obsessed with a late-silent-era star, Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore). Selznick’s book contains a story within a story, allowing Haynes to serve up a perfect pastiche of Victor Sjöström’s 1928 silent film, The Wind. When an emotional Rose leaves the cinema, she is assaulted by banners announcing the imminent arrival of the talkies.
The poignancy of this is not lost on Haynes, but then little is. The most whimsical leap of Selznick’s story leads to a middle section giddy with discovery: Ben, too, is suddenly rendered deaf, when lightning is conducted down his phone line, but subsequently escapes from hospital.
Haynes’s vision of two New Yorks, a half-century apart, is a marvel of nested detail, alert to things rusted and forgotten rather than shiny and new. It harks back to the urban loneliness of Carol, but instead of adults in freefall, here are three children, Rose, Ben and Jamie, another loner whom Ben encounters in the American Museum of Natural History, yearning to find their place.
To be grown-ups in this picture is to have your dialogue muted; everyone who communicates anything important writes it down. Being deaf is to be doubly a child in this universe, trapped within yourself, and slow to comprehend your destiny. Once again, Haynes has found a special variety of loneliness buried away here, and proves himself one of its greatest cinematic poets. TR