Review: A Wrinkle in Time
There's something irresistibly ingratiating about Ava DuVernay's film adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's beloved 1962 classic, A Wrinkle in Time. Yes, it can be ungainly and laboured. Yes, it can feel both hurried and meandering. Yes, it sands down the book's Christian overtones to embrace a more universal and timely message of female empowerment. Yet, despite its messiness, or perhaps even because of it, it makes for a particularly satisfying experience.
The story revolves around thirteen-year-old Meg Murry (the remarkable Storm Reid), still recovering from the disappearance of her astrophysicist father Alex (Chris Pine), who believed he had found a way to travel through great distances of space via a tesseract. No one seems to understand the way his vanishing has affected her - not the mean girls who bully her at school; not the principal (André Holland), who thinks she's using her father's absence to act out; not her mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, radiant but underused), who has bought into the majority opinion that Alex was having a mental breakdown. Only Meg's classmate Calvin (Levi Miller) and her younger adoptive brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), appear to recognise her inner strength.
Charles Wallace proves a pivotal figure in Meg's quest to find their missing father. He's befriended a trio of women who reveal themselves to be otherworldly figures. There's Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), a red-tressed flibbertigibbet who is frequently hilariously dismissive of Meg's role in the proceedings. Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), Charles explains, has evolved past language and thus only speaks in quotations such as the one from Rumi with which she greets Meg, "The wound is the place where light enters you." Last but certainly not least is Mrs. Which, embodied by none other than Oprah Winfrey, who first appears as a looming astral projection. To say Winfrey is an inspired casting choice is an understatement. If DuVernay's Afrocentric vision for A Wrinkle in Time is not as revolutionary as Ryan Coogler's for Black Panther, it nonetheless features a world where Maya Angelou and James Baldwin are evoked and, significantly, where a bi-racial girl is its superhero and whose superpower derives from using her intelligence, embracing her faults and believing in herself? Winfrey has been the patron saint for such self-empowerment, so it's only befitting that she would incarnate a character who is as Oprah as Oprah herself.
The three women inform Meg that her father had indeed wrinkled time and is currently being held captive by The IT, an evil entity plotting to take over the universe. They do not know her father's exact location, but they can guide her in the right direction. Thus Meg embarks on an intergalactic journey with Charles Wallace and Calvin in tow, the three of them discovering new worlds and braving several obstacles. DuVernay conjures up some beautiful imagery - a field of gossiping flowers who converse in colour, a dense forest that springs up out of nowhere, any shot of Witherspoon, Kaling, and Winfrey in their array of fantastic costumes - but what's most interesting is how, despite its very prominent radical elements, A Wrinkle in Time feels like an old-fashioned fantasy film in its earnestness. In fact, the true source of its power and charm may be that juxtaposition. It has no interest in being cool but rather practices what it preaches: it finds its own right frequency and has faith in what it is.
A Wrinkle in Time
Directed by: Ava DuVernay
Written by: Jennifer Lee, Jeff Stockwell; based on the book by Madeleine L'Engle
Starring: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Storm Reid, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Zach Galifianakis, Chris Pine, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, André Holland, Rowan Blanchard
