Sparkling visuals can’t smooth ‘Wrinkle’
Head-scratching adaptation of sci-fi children’s classic flat on substance
The power of love can only do so much in Disney’s misbegotten A Wrinkle in Time.
Director Ava DuVernay ( Selma) tries hard for a big-hearted fantasy adventure akin to The NeverEnding Story with an enchanting teen heroine and sparkling visuals. Still, those positives can’t help Wrinkle ( ★★☆☆; rated PG; in theaters nationwide Friday), which is plundered by a woeful, headscratching adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s sci-fi children’s classic.
Meg Murry (Storm Reid) is a misfit teenager who’s mocked by mean girls at school and not quite the A student she used to be before her NASA scientist dad (Chris Pine) disappeared four years ago. After her latest trip to the principal’s office — Meg throws a basketball rather hard in the face of a classmate who is making fun of her prodigious little brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) — the Murry kids and their mom (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) are visited by the eccentric Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon).
Meg finds out that in trying to “shake hands with the universe,” her father discovered a tesseract, a way to bend space and time in order to travel to other dimensions. Mrs. Whatsit and her two fellow mystical beings, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), tell Meg that a sinister force called The It has taken Mr. Murry, and the trio recruits Meg, her classmate Calvin (Levi Miller) and Charles Wallace as the newest warriors to fight this swirling swath of darkness.
While Pine, who’s not in much of the movie, is all bearded emotion as the troubled Mr. Murry, newcomer Reid lends a surprising amount of gravitas to Meg as she grows from distrusting shy girl to determined protagonist. Witherspoon’s Mrs. Whatsit
flings sharp insults with a smile, like a magical grown-up version of Election’s Tracy Flick, and Mrs. Who is an oddball who mainly communicates via quotations from famous figures like Churchill and Shakespeare. The highlight of their trio is Winfrey’s over-the-top, grandmotherly Mrs. Which: The bejeweled lady just looks as if she gives out the best hugs ever. (Also, while President Oprah isn’t the worst idea, Wrinkle reminds us that she’s a pretty good actress. More movies, please?)
DuVernay also does wonders in crafting an inviting fantasy landscape. She has an interesting visual style, with close-ups and perspectives that aren’t usually seen in the genre, and she blends the familiar with the alien: When Meg and her crew venture to The It’s planet, they’re met by Stepford moms and kids in a freaky suburbia followed by a trippy jaunt to a busy beach with Red (Michael Peña), an evil Colonel Sanders type whose hypnotic presence is all too fleeting.
L’Engle’s source material is a sneakily deep novel for youngsters, and Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell’s screenplay doesn’t do nearly enough with those themes of death, loss and parents letting their children down. Instead, theirs is a patchwork adaptation with weak character development, a lack of narrative groove and a haphazard finish.
At least it does nail a certain underlying sweetness: A young Meg’s dad tells her, “Love is always there, even if you can’t feel it,” and that’s echoed throughout the fantasy. And switching up the characters from the book — it was DuVernay’s vision to make Meg African American and have her supernatural guardian angels be younger than their elderly literary counterparts — broadens the project’s appeal. (Between Meg, Shuri in Black Panther and the women of Annihilation, female scientists in movies are having an awesome 2018.)
Youngsters will enjoy DuVernay’s visuals and strong-willed main character, while the older folks marvel at the inclusion of a new Sade song (her first in seven years). But across the board, this disappointing Time will cause more than a little wrinkling of the forehead in frustration.