A Wrinkle In Time
3 stars
Director: Ava DuVernay
Stars: Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon
Duration: 109 mins
Class: ??
KRS Releasing Ltd
A Wrinkle in Time, the big-screen adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult novel of the same name first published in 1962, has been one of the most eagerly anticipated features in recent years.
The film arrives on a groundswell of hype. Its line-up includes acclaimed director Ava DuVernay (the first female black director tasked with a big-budget movie of this ilk), a cast including Hollywood A-listers Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine, and beloved media and entertainment matriarch Opray Winfrey, and as its protagonist a young teen black science nerd who’s a girl. Yet, for all its superb production values and game cast, the whole does not quite add up to the sum of its parts.
The heroine of the piece is Meg Murry (Storm Reid), an incredibly gifted and introverted student who struggles with the social aspects of middle school life... struggles borne of her difficulty to come to terms with the disappearance of her physicist father Alex (Pine) some years before. She finds some solace at home with her heartbroken mother Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and equally intelligent and somewhat precocious little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). Yet, Meg finds it difficult to emerge from her shell.
The siblings are visited by three beings as old as the universe: Mrs Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs Who (Mindy Kaling). They explain that their father’s disappearance was linked to his experiments in ‘tessering’ – a folding of time and space by which he believed intergalactic travel to be possible. Much to the kids’ surprise and delight, the trio announce he is still alive somewhere in the cosmos, but in grave danger as a dark force threatens to overcome the universe. It is up to them to find him, under the guidance of the three Mrs (Mrses?).
For all its superb production values and game cast, the whole does not quite add up to the sum of its parts
I concede that I tend to overuse the phrase ‘style over substance’ but it is certainly true here. A Wrinkle in Time is undeniably a visual delight, the cinematography, production design and effects fusing together to create the eye-popping looks of the different worlds the kids visit - from the sun-soaked lush greens, vivid blues and the most golden of yellows of a magnificent meadow to the grim and gloomy shades of a forbidding forest via a dazzling multicolour-umbrella-laden beach scene.
Each landscape is more beautiful than the one before, the audience needing a few moments of pause either to bask in the film’s pictorial splendour or to avoid being overwhelmed by it.
And yet, the plot lumbers on... failing to live up to the standards of the film’s design. Plot devices range from the vague to the confusing and do not meld into a cohesive whole. Much is said of ‘tessering’ but how it works is never explained – note to filmmakers, not all of us have a PhD. We are therefore made to accept that the kids and their guides can jump from planet to planet just like that.
Who and what the three Mrs are and where they came from is never explained. Charles Wallace inexplicably turns from cute and cuddly to cold and cruel from one scene to the next... oddball characters turn up, spout words of wisdom or warning, then disappear. The antagonist of the piece, an entity known as IT (no relation to the clown of the eponymous film), is rather ill-defined and never really poses much of a threat to the characters.
For all their collective experience, Winfrey, Witherspoon and Kaling do little more than inhabit their (undeniably striking and imaginative) costumes and makeup.
Winfrey looms (literally) over proceedings as the warm and worldly-wise Mrs Which, Witherspoon plays dippy and curious as Mrs. Whatsit, while Kaling’s Mrs Who speaks dialogue taken famous historical personalities (Churchill, Gandhi, 13th Century Persian poet Rumi and, erm, Lin-Manuel Miranda among others).
Levi Miller is a little wan as Meg’s potential love interest Calvin, while McCabe does precocious very well. Mbatha-Raw is saddled with very little to do as Meg’s mother and Alex’s pining wife. The emotional heft lies completely with Reid, who carries of her role with aplomb and imbues Meg with a suitable amount of pain as she struggles to find her place in this world and others. Her scenes with Pine – ironically the simplest and most intimate – are by far the best overall.
All that said, I can’t deny that the film’s heart is in the right place. I have no doubt that the younger audience will fully embrace its characters and the sense of adventure it projects. Maybe, they’ll understand the process of tessering more than I did!