The Notorious 2018 Flop Adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time Is Corny, Old-Fashioned and Deeply Entertaining
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I grew up in the 1980s, when minority representation in films and television was so scant that any time a studio or network made something prominently featuring homosexuals or black leads it was considered a referendum on whether mainstream America was ready for entertainment that brazenly acknowledged the existence of people who weren’t white or rigidly heterosexual.
We’ve come a long way since then but sweet blessed lord do we ever have a long way to go. The sizable percentage of the internet who angrily denounce what they see as the sins and evils of “identity politics” yet cling to their identities as white Christians with sweaty, furious desperation all the same have declared war on the forces of “wokeness” and cultural diversity.
They behave as if every time a movie is made with a minority in a role previously played by a white person it stabs both baby Jesus AND baby Superman in the heart.
For centuries people who look like me have been wildly over-represented EVERYWHERE, but particularly in entertainment yet defensive, insecure white folks act as if every step forward for POC or the LGTBQ community represents a grievous, unforgivable insult to whiteness, and Christianity.
These sad people have turned “Get Woke Go Broke” into a catchphrase for incels and other people terrified of progress, women and progress involving women.
They did their damnedest to try to convince the world that The Last Jedi was a widely reviled flop that killed Star Wars by embracing diversity despite it grossing well over a billion dollars and getting some of the best reviews for a Star Wars movie.
They similarly depicted Captain Marvel as another BRUTAL loss for Disney because, while yes, it did gross well over a billion dollar and got stellar reviews, it starred an unapologetic feminist who hurt their feelings by being an unapologetic feminist and also a woman.
When a movie with a diverse cast or LGTBQ characters does genuinely flop they’re so overjoyed and feel so validated that they jizz all over themselves and each other in delight, but not in a gay way, because these defenders of the children, the precious, precious children are comfortable in their sexuality as only someone who has a heart attack every time a same sex kiss occurs in a children’s film can be.
These reactionary forces of cultural regression consequently busted many a nut over the disastrous first week box-office of Strange Worlds, which Wikipedia describes as a film featuring “Walt Disney Animation Studios' first openly LGBTQ teenaged character” shortly before mentioning that it is a bomb that might lose its studio nearly 150 million dollars.
This feels like an unfortunate repeat of 2018’s The Wrinkle in Time. When Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s classic 1962 fantasy novel similarly stiffed at the box-office, losing Disney well over one hundred million dollars, the enemies of progress once again declared victory and blamed the movie’s dismal commercial showing on its decision to make its protagonist biracial instead of white.
I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was a child. I quite liked it but I don’t remember much about it beyond it being very Christian and a clear-cut allegory about the evils of Communism and conformity.
In that respect it was very much a product of its time, the Cold War. If A Wrinkle in Time had highlighted that aspect and kept the hero white I suspect that Conservatives would not have a problem with it.
That is not the film DuVernay made, however. She made a film at once timely and boldly out of time. A Wrinkle in Time feels like a product of the 1960s, alright, but the late 1960s counterculture and the New Age movement, not the Camelot era.
A Wrinkle in Time similarly hearkens back to both the Spielbergian wonder of classics like E.T and the weird, dark Disney of Something Wicked This Way Comes andThe Black Hole.
If A Wrinkle in Time were a person, it would own a lot of crystals and talk about goddess energy. It’s a hippie dippy New Age exploration of the eternal battle of light and darkness.
In L’Engle’s book the battle between light and darkness is very clearly symbolic of the struggle between democracy and Communism and Atheism and Christianity. In DuVernay’s film, however, the battle between darkness and light legit seems to be an only semi-allegorical battle between good and evil.
DuVernay’s boldly sincere fantasy film begins by introducing the Murry family as a collection of geniuses led by Dr. Alexander Murry (Chris Pine), an astrophysicist so brilliant that he has figured out a way to travel through space using a device known as the tesseract that allows people to teleport to faraway planets.
The genius inventor disappears, leaving his depressed, neurotic daughter Meg (Storm Reid), his spookily precocious adopted son Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and brilliant wife Dr. Kate Murry (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) devastated and grief-stricken.
The early scenes of Pine’s kindly dreamer interacting tenderly with his adoring family reminded me of the swooning sincerity and ambition of Terence Malick’s Tree of Life. DuVernay takes big swings here. She is admirably unafraid to look ridiculous. This is a work of overwhelming sincerity, utterly devoid of cynicism and irony, and I think that ultimately worked against it commercially.
There’s no Han Solo in this world to crack wise, act as an audience surrogate and comment acerbically on the wild new worlds the heroes find themselves in. There's nothing to undercut or subvert the earnestness or ambition.
A Wrinkle in Time understands that being a smart thirteen year old can be an inhuman crucible even if your dad is not stranded on a planet galaxies away. Meg suffers and broods and worries until one day her life changes forever when she’s visited by a daffy superhuman celestial being known as Ms. Whatsit.
With her all-consuming quirkiness, delirious daffiness and irrepressible lust for life, Ms. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) is essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Goddess. Only instead of winning the heart and changing the life of a lonely man in need of love and inspiration, Ms. Whatsit sweeps into the life of a lonely, depressed little girl and shows her that the universe contains wonders and joys beyond her wildest imagination.
Ms. Whatsit isn’t the only Manic Pixie Dream Goddess in the movie. Mindy Kaling is radiant, gorgeous and only mildly annoying as Ms. Who, an astral being who communicates almost entirely in famous quotations from eminent minds that include Outkast, Chris Tucker in Friday and Lin Manuel-Miranda.
If that sounds a bit much, that’s because it is. But the biggest Ms., literally and figuratively, is Ms. Which, an ancient astral being who gives the children wisdom and inspiration for their journey through the cosmos to find their dad and the light within themselves.
That Oprah herself is the one dispensing nuggets of wisdom is one of many elements that apparently made science fiction gate-keepers feel like this wasn’t just not for them but rather an unforgivable assault on their white, male traditionalist sensibilities.
The trio of goddesses warn Meg, Charles and their friend Calvin (Levi Miller from Better Watch Out) that the forces of light are in an all-out war with The It, a malevolent universal darkness intent on destroying and corrupting all it touches. In L’Engle’s original text The It seem like a very direct metaphor for Communism as well as capitalist conformity but mostly Communism.
The filmmakers eschew that political dimension in favor of a more abstract war between the primal forces of good and evil.
DuVernay fills the frame with radiant color that makes the inky blackness of The It stands out in even sharper contrast.
I had a bifurcated response to A Wrinkle in Time. I regularly rolled my eyes and groaned at its hokey earnestness and New Age mysticism even as I was genuinely moved and entertained by it.
In a sense, it comes down to belief. You either give yourself over to the movie’s loopy charms and lose yourself in its trippy world-building and have a good time or you hold onto your cynicism and suffer.
I knew which path I chose and I am happy with it but it appears that much of the rest of the world chose the path of cynicism and negativity and needlessly punished themselves as well as a flawed but very worthy and very lovely motion picture.
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