A Wrinkle in Time may leave adults feeling talked down to
Few wrinkles in saga brought to screen at perfect moment
A Wrinkle in Time is the first major release since the 2018 Academy Awards called for more inclusion in the movies and it certainly echoes that theme. The multi-ethnic female-led cast includes Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling as a trio of guardian angels and Storm Reid as Meg, the main character from the 1962 novel by Madeleine L’Engle. Director Ava DuVernay is a woman of colour and an Oscar nominee from a year ago for her documentary 13th. The film is a sensory feast, not least when the characters travel to a planet called Uriel, which looks like Pandora with better landscaping. Meg is trying to find her father (Chris Pine), a NASA scientist who disappeared four years earlier while trying to figure out a way to travel to the stars without a spaceship. He wanted to figure out the universe, to “find its origin and shake its hand,” which makes for a lovely image of peaceable exploration.
Meg is accompanied in her quest by her six-year-old adopted brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and by Calvin (Levi Miller), a neighbourhood kid who just kind of shows up and tags along. (Don’t blame screenwriter Jennifer Lee: That’s pretty much how it happens in the book, too.) The kids get some much-needed assistance from the aforementioned angelic trio, who are brimming with warmth, wisdom and glittery lip gloss, and who answer to Mrs. Which, Who and Whatsit. What I wouldn’t give to see Abbott and Costello show up. Much has been made of Disney giving the reins of a $100-million project to a female director. I could find only two other Disney live-action movies this decade directed by women, the much smaller budgeted Queen of Katwe (Mira Nair) and McFarland, USA (Niki Caro). But the result here is still very much in the Disney mould: You can feel the guiding hand of the director, but the even heavier hand of the studio over her, shaping the final vision. None of which makes A Wrinkle in Time a bad movie, though it is an oddly pedestrian one, given its interstellar locations. Pitched to a young audience, it may leave adults feeling talked down to, particularly when Winfrey’s character delivers a Yoda-esque rant about an impersonal evil entity, called simply IT, and accompanied by some clunky anti-bodyshaming images that bring the whole thing dangerously close to after-school-special territory. But there are far worse sins a movie can commit than being too earnest. Meg starts the film awkward, shy and bullied at school, only gradually coming to realize that she possesses real power, and that our talents are not great in themselves — it’s what we do with them that defines us. Kids should get the most out of all this. The danger of IT feels palpable without ever getting gory, and there are moments that are more thrill ride than terrifying, as when Meg and Calvin travel in a tree stump that’s been uprooted by a tornado — or to use the movie term, by Oz-mosis. Kaling ’s character, Mrs. Who, gets some of the film’s best lines by stealing those of others — she speaks mostly in famous quotations, ending each with a credit to the writer, including 13th-century Muslim poet Rumi, Churchill, Shakespeare and, to show she’s up to date, rappers OutKast and Hamilton’s LinManuel Miranda.
Movies in the #MeToo era are seldom about mere entertainment, and A Wrinkle in Time passes what I’m going to call the Frances McDormand test — strong female characters in front of the camera, and a good representation behind it, including the writer, director, producer Catherine Hand and production designer Naomi Shohan.
But audiences do want to be entertained, and Wrinkle delivers. It won’t transport every viewer to its glorious place, but its message to little girls and boys comes through loud and clear.