I WANTED to like A Wrinkle in Time the minute I entered the moviehouse. This was not a problem for the first half of the film. We know that something would happen to this family, but the feeling about the dark clouds on the horizon was more of an anticipation than a threat.
The story isn’t simple. The father in this young family is a physicist; the mother is a scientist, as well. The atmosphere is simple: a world of pastel and trees and warm living rooms. What evil can befall upon these gentle people? Oh, but the father is in search of something that Einstein, were he around this time, would be cautious and circumspect about. He’s looking for a way to break through the space into a different time horizon. He questions our limited and limiting notion of time and space. He’s telling us that time and space travel can be done. Alex, the father, teleports himself—and disappears.
We arrive at the scene where Alex is already gone. He leaves behind a wife who manages not to talk about what’s happened. The problem is Alex has left behind a daughter and a precocious son. In the school that Meg, the daughter, attends, she is bullied by her classmates. The neighbors, teachers and classmates of the two children talk about the disappearance of Alex. Everyone wants to believe that the disappearance of Alex is material. In other words, Alex must have gone to another place. Meg, of course, believes that her father is still alive, somewhere, and that he has indeed found the key to space travel and he is in another dimension, a site that defies the more acceptable law of time and space being linear.
Meg gets into trouble one day. She couldn’t bear hearing the offensive remarks from one of her classmates. Meg finally snaps one day and hits the classmate with a ball. The parents complain but Meg is hardheaded. She leaves the office of the principal causing everyone to be distressed.
A male classmate, the popular guy in the school, comes over. Calvin tells Meg she is a good person and he loves her hair. Meg, as usual, becomes self-conscious about all this. She thinks she doesn’t deserve the attention of this boy. Calvin persists and his presence in the home of Meg alters a bit the dreariness in the household.
One night, a strange lady who looks like she has stepped out of a madman’s ballroom, or is on her way to a carnival, visits Meg’s home. The woman introduces herself as Mrs. Whatsit. She seems to know many things about the family. But she can’t be a fairy godmother because her advice or language doesn’t make sense at all. Mrs. Whatsit appears to bring a kind of odd magic to the house, especially to Charles Wallace, Meg’s younger brother.
The next day, the three—Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin—walk into an abandoned old home. Charles Wallace, who shows more links to strangers now manifesting in their lives, actually dares to enter the crumbling house. Once inside, they are greeted by Mrs. Who, who sits in a chair and bursts into quotations from plays and poems every now and then, and then falls sleep. The next day, the third character, Mrs. Who, appears as a giant. The three are astral travelers who, as in fairy tales, know the situation of Meg. The three are certain they could find Meg’s father who, they believe, moved through a tesseract—a kind of teleportation—and ended up in a planet where he is being held captive by a dark power.
At this point and a few minutes more, the film is priceless in its enchantment. One realizes the magic has begun the moment one of the astral travelers appeared before the children. And it continues up to the time Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin believed in and moved through the tesseract. The vitality of the narrative is such that we don’t want the charm to end. Disbelief doesn’t need to be suspended; it has suspended itself.
How long can this magic last? That’s one question the audience must have asked at a point.
There’s another critical problem: Where does this story lead?
Indeed, Meg and her team find the father. Fine, what can the young girl do now? What must she be allowed to do by the story?
Happiness at the end of a story doesn’t always bring happiness. That much I can tell you as I stop myself from spoiling you having your own time with A Wrinkle in Time.
There are two stories in A Wrinkle in Time. One is about science and the empirical—which can be questioned and be boring. The other is about the grace of spell, which can be unforgettable.
Where do you think the movie will lead you?
The problem with A Wrinkle in Time is it doesn’t know how to cope with the power of its alluring narrative. It engages us by enabling us to forget the old form of telling a story where space can’t be negotiated and where time is somewhat absolute. As Meg attempts to rescue her father and fights her own younger brother seemingly possessed by an evil spirit, her world starts to be empirical and enduringly boring. The better half of the story, which sees a woman transformed into a giant leaf with the wings of a creature, pushes us to rethink where we are in this real universe. In other worlds, and other planets, flowers talk and plants can save human beings. It’s a whole new world without the song of flight and freedom. It is a world that doesn’t need saving.
Can one really rescue a beloved who’s caught between a powerful metaphor and a reality that has been breached and already subverted by other film concourses?
The story of A Wrinkle in Time can only survive its own death if it won’t be afraid to accept the eternal. You know, life after death or life. Films are glorious when they’re able to live with the metaphors—or artifice—they create. After an hour and till its ending, the film manages to tell me how it fears the fantastic and the transcendental. Poetry dies and the prosaic thrives. Reese Witherspoon as the chatty Mrs. Whatsit is a charmer. Mindy Kaling of The Mindy Project plays the enchantress with the penchant for quotations properly referenced. Oprah Winfrey plays Mrs. Who. As the most powerful of the space travelers, Mrs. Who sounds very much like the Oprah of television, the person who can be didactic without losing the splendor of her personality.
The young performers have conviction in their very young age. Storm Reid is mature and beguiling as Meg; Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace tilts a bit toward ham acting but who cares? He’s a young, young boy. Levi Miller as Calvin is all blue eyes and that’s all he needs to hog the screen.
Ava Duvernay, a rising female director and written as the first black female director to be part of a huge, mainstream feature film with a budget going beyond $100 million, is at the helm of this film written by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell. The story of the film is based on the book by Madeleine L’Engle.
Interesting how evil never disappears and how, sometimes, it can be stronger than the Light or Good, as represented by the three space travelers. Interesting even is the thought that it’s easier for us to relate to the metaphors about life and goodness in the imagined world than situating it in the gritty day-to-day living. Wrinkles are really part of life and are thus not only acceptable but necessary. A Wrinkle in Time travels a long, long way only to find its own happiness in its own backyard, with or without the mystery of astrophysics.