wonderstruck
Wonderstruck i Todd Haynes crafts an ode to silent cinema with a magical fable about two deaf pre-teens on an odyssey around New York.
Todd Haynes’ latest is guaranteed to leave you... well, you get the gist.
Arguably American cinema’s most eclectic director, Todd Haynes has successfully tackled paranoid horror (Safe), Douglas Sirk melodrama (Far From Heaven), idiosyncratic biopic (I’m Not There), glam rock musical (Velvet Goldmine) and tender period romance (Carol). Now he’s mastered the all-ages fantasy with Wonderstruck, based on the illustrated novel by Hugo Cabret author Brian Selznick. “I had a stubborn belief that kids could handle something like this,” Haynes tells Teasers. “Something with the same care, obsessive historical and stylistic concerns, and an even more aggressive, formalist experimentation than my other films.”
A director of strictly adults-only fare to date, Haynes desire to tell a family-friendly story dates back to his formative years, when he was “deranged and rearranged” by movies such as Mary Poppins and The Wizard
Of Oz. Wonderstruck also offered a rare opportunity for a self-evident cineaste. With the story split across two time periods – the ’20s and the ’70s – he was able to homage two distinct, and equally influential, periods of filmmaking, aping the styles of each eras’ pre-eminent directors. With the film reverberating between these periods, part of the mystery becomes why we are watching these twin adventures, and how they connect.
Essentially two tales in one, Wonderstruck is told from the perspective of its young leads.
Ben (Pete’s Dragon star Oakes Fegley) is a shaggy-haired 12-year-old from Gunflint, Massachusetts, in 1977. With his father absent and his mother (Michelle Williams) recently killed in an automobile accident, Ben is left in the care of his auntie. One night a freak
lightning storm renders Ben deaf, inspiring him to pursue the only clue in his possession to the identity of his father – a bookmark embedded in the pages of a peculiar tome called Wonderstruck, a quest that draws him to the Natural History Museum…
All the while Haynes cuts back and forth to 1927. First Hoboken, New Jersey, where the similarly hearing-impaired Rose (debut actress Millicent Simmonds, soon to be seen in Emily Blunt horror A Quiet Place) spends her days watching the movies of silent cinema star Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore). Dreaming of a rendezvous with Mayhew, she too takes a solo journey to New York, and finds herself similarly drawn to the Natural History Museum.
As Rose, Haynes cast deaf actor Simmonds. Knowing not only how “incredibly meaningful” it would be to the movie, Haynes also sought an actor who could understand Rose “in ways that I can’t claim to understand”. Discovering Utah-native Simmonds among a stack of tapes (well, hard drives) shoulder high, Haynes was immediately struck by her intuitive understanding of the medium. “It’s really uncanny to me how innate this is to her, because a lot of it’s about the scale of your articulation.” Haynes explains. “She somehow knew just the right amount to draw you in.”
When it came to Ben, whose unexplained cosmic connection to Rose forms the lynchpin of the film, Haynes turned to Fegley. As well as convincing as a child who must navigate the world without sound for the first time in his life, any actor playing Ben also needed good old-fashioned chutzpah. “You needed to believe that this kid had a drive, a doggedness, that would make it plausible that he would get on a bus in Minnesota and travel on his own to New York City,” Haynes says, before a brief pause. “Really, it’s this crazy shit in the story, but no one ever questions it! That’s entirely down to this kid and his performance.”
Alongside this young cast, Haynes brought his Safe/Far From Heaven star Julianne Moore back into the fold, with Moore playing drastically different roles in each era. “I knew she would be perfect and that it would be a fun transition for her,” Haynes says of his most consistent on-camera collaborator. “Both characters are very different stylistically, so she had to draw on specific source material to research each one, which she really gets into in everything that she does.” Playing a deaf character under subtle prosthetics in the ’70s half of the story, Moore took the responsibility of playing a hearing-impaired character to heart. “She wanted to bring real specificity and knowledge and careful training to the role, because the deaf community doesn’t get enough representation in movies in general. She really wanted to make sure she was representing that community in an honourable way.”
Delving even further into his own back catalogue, Wonderstruck features a striking animated sequence amid the displays and dioramas of the Natural History Museum that echoes Haynes’ cult short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
– where the cast was populated by modified Barbie dolls. “It was fun to be back working with dolls,” Haynes smiles. “I did a couple of the little hand-on-a-stick moments myself. People were taking pictures of me and laughing.”
Dolls aren’t the only surprising blast from Haynes’ past. Twenty years after Bowie vetoed the use of his songs in Velvet Goldmine, Haynes has finally landed his white whale, with the Thin White Duke’s ‘Space Oddity’ providing a musical through-line, alongside Carter Burwell’s typically sublime score. “I have a friend who saw a cut of the movie. He said, ‘I really like the film. I just don’t know if we need all that stuff that you added to it – the David Bowie song, the Oscar Wilde quote…’ And I’m like, ‘Check out the script, dude. Check out the book. For once this isn’t me!’” JF
ETA | 6 April / WondErsTruck opEns in TWo monThs.
‘I HAD A STUBBORN BELIEF THAT KIDS COULD HANDLE SOMETHING LIKE THIS’ TODD HAYNES