By the mighty shrine of Oprah, I thought Annihilation was confusing. Annihilation, however, was the instructive use of a toaster compared to A Wrinkle in Time. The best way I can describe A Wrinkle in Time is imagine you’re watching a basketball game and, without warning, the second quarter begins with both teams playing ice hockey instead of basketball, which remains the case for the rest of the game. But in the end, your team wins, so … yay?
Eccentric scientist/family-man Dr. Alex Murry (Chris Pine) has an idea about space travel involving frequencies. I don’t know what problem he intends to solve with his theory, but he figures out that if you just tune your radio the right way, you can travel to Pluto instead of getting NPR. Yeah, there’s a premise that isn’t the light-year-est bit full of shit. Long story short, Dr. Murry is gone for four years and his eldest, troubled-tween Meg (Storm Reid) uses the time to alienate everybody at school.
The modern cliché of a precocious movie child savant reaches the nth level when Wrinkle presents Meg’s brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), who is less five-year-old and more a hobbit version of Stephen Hawking. Unafraid of the machinations of strangers and the universe, Charles Wallace (and, yes, he is constantly referred to in the film as “Charles Wallace”), anyhoo Chucky W. invites an semi-omniscient, semi-immortal, and semi-lucid being over for a playdate. Unfortunately, Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) turns out to be the Suzanne Somers of goddesses. You know the “dumb blonde” routine doesn’t actually improve just because you’re supernatural, right?
The movie promises that we will understand what’s happened to Dr. Murry once head witch Oprah shows up and then we can get Meg, Chuck, and random boytoy (Levi Miller) to search the universe for clues. Instead what I understood is that the costumer and make-up artists were rationed a bucket of crack and free reign to design whatever Yellow Submarine drug-induced fantasy they could come up with for Oprah, Reese, and Mindy Kaling. Each woman has a vibrant new gown, hairstyle, and sassy lipstick shade to signal that the script has advanced to the next page. Oprah has ever-changing eyebrow bling. Yes, ‘brow bling; it’s now a thing. The biggest problem of the film for me was watching these children treat the bizarre costume changes coinciding with every new scene and not saying, “WTF?!”
Of course, these are all distractions; the plot is about Meg getting her father back from his celestial “prison.” There’s a mood of tolerance and a theme of self-empowerment that goes with this quest, which would mean something if any small part of the plot made an ounce of sense. How is dad trapped again? How do they find him? How does this travel work? What is the role of the witches here? What is the villain exactly? I suppose some of this gets answered if you’re being really, really generous or perhaps a Madeleine L’Engle scholar. I feel like director Ava DuVernay got so wrapped up in the look of the individual scenes that she forgot direction entirely. There are multiple times in which you’ll wonder if each person is acting in a separate film; most of them happen when Oprah is on screen.
Selling
Oprah as some sort of all-powerful benevolent enchantress is a little much; right now I’m picturing her turn as Gandalf running around Middle Earth screaming, “You’ve got a ring! You’ve got a ring! And guess what, Gollum? You’re getting a ring, too!”
A Wrinkle in Time may well be the prettiest film you’ll ever voluntarily sleep through. The cinematography is gorgeous; the sets are wonderful; the costume director is clearly having the time of his life. I certainly can’t fault this film for lack of energy. I can, however, fault it for … pretty much everything else. I cannot honestly tell if this film is a brilliant failure or outright disaster. There’s one other film that comes to mind when I think of A Wrinkle in Time, the Robin Williams dazzling disaster Toys. Like Wrinkle, Toys is a striking film with a pointed message. And like Wrinkle, Toys is an absolute mess, a veritable test case for how unimportant the look of the picture is when nothing on screen makes any sense.
♪When they coven the convene
They’ll bring back the sound of Oprah the actor
They’ll bling back her brows, a major distracter
We’ll cling to a memory we have seen
Let’s throw in a kid to perform with stars
Don’t let her know this plot is confusing
“Hey, there’s witches!” So stop refusing
It’s time to coven the convene♫
Rated PG, 109 Minutes
Director: Ava DuVernay
Writer: Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell
Genre: WTF?!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Well-read middle school girls, maybe?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who like things that make sense
♪ Parody Inspired by “Begin the Beguine”
