Fantasy that sparks the imagination
A Wrinkle in Time PG cert, 109 min
Dir Ava Duvernay Starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Storm Reid, Chris Pine, Mindy Kaling, Levi Miller, Gugu Mbatha-raw, Michael Peña, Zach Galifianakis
The Disney adventure A Wrinkle in Time has broken a particular glass ceiling: it’s the first time a woman of colour, Ava Duvernay, has been handed the keys to a $100million production. Not only this, but Duvernay’s diverse casting lays down new rules. In place of the white heroine of Madeleine L’engle’s 1962 source book – the kind of much-thumbed tone passed expectantly from one generation to the next – the Meg Murry of this adaptation is biracial, embodied by 14-year-old Storm Reid with a marvellous mixture of curiosity and pathos.
Meg’s dad, an intense astrophysicist played by Chris Pine, has gone missing, after an experiment which seems to have whisked him to another plane. The grief-stricken Meg and her precocious younger brother, Charles Wallace (Deric Mccabe, all pantomime glee), are offered the chance to follow their father by slipping – or “tessering”, as L’engle’s terminology has it – into the astral realm using the fifth dimension as a shortcut.
Their guides in this quest are a trio of eccentric witches. Reese Witherspoon is Mrs Whatsit, a loopy redhead who ushers herself uninvited into the Murry home in a silky meringue get-up. Mindy Kaling is underused as Mrs Who, a mysterious seer speaking only in quotations. But there’s certainly no missing Oprah Winfrey’s Mrs Which, a majestic earth mother of jewelled brow and vast munificence, who first appears in giant form floating above the Murrys’ garden. Quizzed about whether she might be the wrong size to swish between dimensions, she has a very Oprah-ish answer ready: “Is there such a thing as ‘the wrong size’?”
It’s a little like imagining Maya Angelou as a levitating BFG. And further transformations await once we’ve ducked through to the other side, with a verdant fantasyscape to explore. When the children need to be whisked up for an aerial view of this new paradise, Witherspoon obliges, turning into a flying lettuce leaf with room on board and a beatific smileyface. Flowers talk in petal semaphore; perilous walkways dangle impossibly above the clouds.
The film’s messaging, heavy-handed as it can be, has some firework moments that might really spark the imagination. “Do you realise how many events, choices, had to occur since the birth of the universe leading up to the making of you?”, Mrs Which asks Meg. Finding your individual place in the cosmos, while grasping the evolutionary process as a daisychain of volition and consequence – this is heady stuff for pre-teens, something a little more all-embracing than the fortune cookie wisdom about family we tend to get from Disney.
If anything, it’s the film’s candied surroundings that pose more of a problem. In the blink of an eye, we swoosh from cornfields to the clouds, up mountains and over lakes, but the logistics of tessering come all too easily to the effects department. Rather than the hard-won ordeals of children’s fantasies now forgotten in the mists of time – The Neverending Story springs to mind, with its handmade puppetry and actual sets – Meg’s quest can feel like scrolling between a bunch of state-of-the-art screensavers. It lacks tangibility.
Forces of evil are at work, but they’re as abstract as Mordor, and given human face only once in a while – Michael Peña’s cameo as a clown-suited, red-eyed interloper on a packed pleasure beach is genuinely sinister but all too brief. The quantities of green-screen emoting are a lot to ask of the child actors. It’s remarkable, though, how persuasively Storm Reid pulls through. Duvernay’s genuine triumph is making Meg relatable, rootable-for, and worth following through every zigzagging rabbit hole of Jennifer Lee’s script.
The choices leading up to it are sometimes cheats, but the film’s moving finale owes a huge amount to Reid. If there’s one thing the Cgi-asmagic-carpet era can’t yet succeed in falsifying, it’s this young actress’s intuitions for coming back to earth.