A Wrinkle in Time Offers Waking Daydream

By Katherine Monk

Sometimes movies just try too hard to be meaningful and A Wrinkle in Time hyperventilates in its effort to take us somewhere magical and memorable. Because that’s what a lot of people expected from this adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s metaphysical teen classic that rearranged the very nature of perception.

Centred around the story of Meg, a 13-year-old with a gift for self-destruction, the story works as an update of the Wizard of Oz for the quantum age. Years after her scientist father goes missing from his lab, abandoning Meg and her pregnant mother, Meg is transported to a different world filled with magical sights and mysterious beings.

The mode of transit is not a tornado, but a Tesseract — no, not the geometric a cube within a cube, octochoron-thing — this kind of Tesseract means you can astral travel using your mind.

This is where the theme of personal empowerment meets the boundaries of physics, so you might as well cast Oprah as the magical embodiment of mind over matter.

The big O plays Mrs. Which, one of three fateful Madames who guides Meg through her maze of thoughts so she can see her goal clearly. That goal is finding her father, but the moment she gets close, IT gets in the way. IT is the bad stuff: Dark matter that attacks good thoughts, happy feelings and positive energy. IT can kill you, but only if you aren’t strong enough to keep love in your heart.

This is where the theme of personal empowerment meets the boundaries of physics, so you might as well cast Oprah as the magical embodiment of mind over matter.

In this version, featuring young Storm Reid as Meg, the big disruptor is Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), her five-year-old brother who has a natural gift for Tesseract-travel because he’s a child genius who can read minds. Emotionally speaking, Meg is afraid her young sibling will usurp her throne of love. It’s why she’s so desperate to find dad (Chris Pine): She knew he loved her. She felt it.

There’s a lot swirling through this galaxy of souls, and DuVernay gets sucked in every direction. She wants to make it real so we can relate to the feelings. She wants to make it magical to live up to the essence of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, not to mention the Disney brand.

She balances the two as best she can by minimizing the special effects while emphasizing certain teen beats — such as when Meg is tempted by the dark side, and sees a more confident  and more popular version of herself.

Some scenes are crafted with such care, you just fall right into them, but the overall result feels at arm’s length: A Mardi Gras parade with a float shaped like Oprah Winfrey, towering over the crowd wearing silver mesh lamé and sequinned eyebrows.

The book doesn’t describe the three Mrs.’s — Which (Winfrey), Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Who (Mindy Kaling) — as something fresh off the floor of Studio 54. Yet, DuVernay and the makeup team decided to go for something undeniably disco in the overall look.

Honestly, it brings the movie an original Star Trek camp, complete with a Bob Mackie cut, which gives it some cult potential. The Diana Ross remix possibilities are endless. So was the film’s potential for true subversion. Because that, too, is kind of what we expected from the first $100-million feature directed by an African-American woman.

Certainly, it’s what many were hoping for. Yet, DuVernay is too earnest, perhaps, to paint outside the lines. A Wrinkle in Time ends up feeling a little by-the-Disney-numbers as it reaffirms family values in familiar ways. It also feels a little too long, especially without palpable suspense. To its credit, the experience feels like a waking dream — somewhere between reality and randomness, a voyage to nowhere in particular powered by the imagination — which is in keeping with the book’s transcendental vibe. But without a bump of fairy dust and a throbbing bass beat, this pretty parade of images and feelings never fully inflates.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, March 9, 2018

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