Last night, I had just finished revising the third draft of my review of A Wrinkle in Time. It ran to a bit over 9,000 words—14 pages when printed out. I decided to hold off on uploading it until I had seen the movie a second time, and could double-check a few things. I took my wife Grace with me. She’s been patiently listening to me rant about the movie. She had read the book in childhood, but didn’t consider it to be one of “the books that wrote her.”
Something interesting happened. Because I knew what was going to happen, I didn’t react so hard to the ways in which the movie diverged from the book. I can’t say I was able to be completely objective about it, or approach it like someone who never read the book. But I feel that I was able to evaluate it a little more fairly on its own merits as a distinct piece of storytelling, rather than a badly botched adaptation.
It’s become clear to me that I was apparently very, very attached to the book—more than I thought I was. If you had asked me, before I saw the movie for the first time, if I was open to seeing an adaptation that did not stick close to the book, I would have said “of course I am.” The book was something I loved in childhood, a “book that wrote me,” but I felt that I could be open to a less-literal adaptation.
Well, apparently I couldn’t be, at least not at first. And so in retrospect, my first review consisted, largely, of me working out my dismay and, yes, anger at what DuVernay and her writers had done to the book. I even titled my first review “More in Anger than in Sorrow.” To justify my gut-level anger, I came up with a lot of very elaborate justifications. After a few days to cool off, and a second viewing, I don’t think I said anything that was entirely wrong, but I think the degree to which I threw myself into making these arguments is unfair to DuVernay.
As they say, the only way out is through, so I’ve now written a second review. It contains many of the ideas I expressed in the first review, but is, I hope, a little more balanced. I have removed a lot of material about the book; you can always read the book yourself. One can’t actually have one’s second thoughts first. But maybe I can at least present my second thoughts first, while still preserving my first thoughts.
Be aware that both reviews contain a lot of spoilers.
You can hear me discuss this movie with Grace on our latest podcast episode. This review is an expanded version of the notes I wrote for that discussion, bringing in some ideas that came up while recording, then trying to hammer it into essay form. I’ll probably bring it up again, and Grace and I will probably discuss it further on the next podcast episode, which we’ll record this weekend. But with the publication of this review, I think I will get the whole thing off my chest, and perhaps won’t feel compelled to keep puzzling over the movie and my reaction.
More In Sorrow Than in Anger: My Second Review of Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, Presented First
I’ve now seen Ava DuVernay’s movie A Wrinkle in Time twice, and after the second viewing, I feel that I can be a bit fairer to the work. It’s a flawed movie, and one which takes an unusually large number of liberties with the source material. This will automatically render it a controversial adaptation for fans of the book. I’m one of them.
Christians are outraged at the movie’s surgical excision of any mentions of God or Jesus. The book has been under a constant barrage of criticism from the evangelical Christian community for promoting New Age values, because Madeleine L’Engle’s vision of Christianity was and is a radically ecumenical, even universal, vision.
This adaptation will stand as a proxy for the book in the minds of many people for years to come. It’s a bitter irony of this adaptation that it makes the story into exactly what evangelical critics have claimed the book is, successfully getting it banned from schools on the basis that it is a touchy-feely, wishy-washy, vaguely spiritual story in which children are taught to worship New Age “spirit guides” instead of God. And so this movie will probably help evangelicals gain ground in their decades-long battle to ban the book.
I’m not outraged as a Christian, personally, but outraged on behalf of Christians, and L’Engle, and her family. I believe the removal of God and Jesus from this story is a textbook example of neoliberal intolerance in the guise of tolerance. And paradoxically, a tolerant society demands that we express intolerance for this kind of intolerance. Christianity is erased on the one hand, and Asian culture and religions are appropriated. I’m much less qualified to talk about the latter than the former, but I think the latter is also troubling.
Much has been made of the movie’s bold stand for representation of people of color in film. As an example of such representation, the movie succeeds remarkably well. The cast is diverse and the performances are excellent. But as a feminist document, the movie fails, falling into superficial feminist tropes that are actually reactionary. The numerous revisions that DuVernay and her screenwriting team made to the original work suggest that their overriding ideology is support for neoliberal capitalism.
Even accepting all these changes, the shrunken story contains a beautiful emotional arc, and is at times quite moving. At the same time, it is clear that DuVernay and her writing team did not particularly understand or approve of the book. They excised almost wholesale the entire story of Camazotz as an allegory on conformity.
Perhaps they felt that it just wouldn’t be possible for one movie to be about both one girl’s journey to self-esteem, and also take on suburban conformity. Personally, I don’t believe a movie of this magnitude needed to be about just a single thing. In fact, limiting the movie so much, in my view, weakens, rather than strengthens it.
Still, it’s a movie worth watching, especially for members of the target audience—adolescent girls of color. There’s much to admire and appreciate in DuVernay’s stripped-down story. There’s an even smaller, play-like adaptation inside, half-buried under the visual weight of the Disney blockbuster. It took a second viewing for me to see its shape more clearly.
Representation
It’s been trumpeted in the press that this is the first movie with a nine-digit budget ($100,000,000) to be directed by a woman of color. That’s a significant milestone, but Bill Gates has a saying: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” A hundred million dollars is a stack of one-dollar bills 6.79 miles tall. Were all those dollars spent on the right things to tell the story? I don’t think there is a direct correlation between budget and quality of the final product in movie-making. And often, I see an inverse correlation, because the people behind large investments like conservative choices, and conservative choices rarely produce a really great movie.
I think what DuVernay has done with the casting is, largely, pretty great. She’s taken an unabashed, unapologetic stand for representation of people of color in movies. The original book isn’t really about the races of the characters, and so this ought to be uncontroversial. For some, it is. But I think Storm Reid does a great job as Meg Murry. I think her acting in this film is beyond criticism; it’s truly impressive. She was a great casting pick. And Deric McCabe (who is Filipino, although I didn’t really notice that until I read about it) also does a great job as Charles Wallace Murry. Some critics have described being unhappy with him, but I think they are really feeling unconvinced by his character rather than the actor, and to that I will say that his character is supposed to be an awkward, oddball, black-sheep-of-the-family. Gugu Mbatha-Raw also does a great job as Dr. Kate Murry, Meg’s mother, although unfortunately her character has a fairly small role in the finished film.
It’s a bit strange that DuVernay makes Charles Wallace adopted, because in the book Charles Wallace is a genius because he’s the even-more-brilliant progeny of two geniuses. If it makes some adopted child happy to see representation of an adopted character in this movie, that’s great. I think the movie tries to make something of this towards the end of the film, when Charles Wallace is possessed by “the It,” and tells his adoptive father “you’re not my real father,” but it isn’t well-developed.
I’m less pleased with the trio of “misses” or “witches,” played by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling. In my original review I pointed out that in the book, L’Engle seemed to reference the triad of female archetypes, “maiden, mother, and crone,” and was unhappy that the movie did not seem to do that, reducing the three “misses” to some sort of airbrushed, ageless middle-age. Watching it again with Grace, she noticed that Witherspoon apparently is supposed to be the maiden, as she arrives wearing white bedsheets, looking like a bride on her wedding day. Kaling is resplendent on Uriel in a variegated gown that emphasizes her hips, creating a mother archetype, and Oprah’s carbon fiber and steel outfits together with gray and white hair and silver lips suggest the gray or white hair of the crone.
I don’t think this entirely works, because Witherspoon doesn’t look particularly young, and Winfrey doesn’t look particularly old. They are heavily made up. This is part of what I mean by describing the movie’s feminist messages as “fake.” No one is allowed to look old. The real Oprah Winfrey is sixty-four years old. In the film she’s not allowed a single wrinkle (except when she wrinkles time, I suppose). Really, it seems like DuVernay is allowing these three different women to express their individuality, but in surprisingly similar ways.
It’s also the case that it’s very hard to see Oprah, in this movie, as anyone other than Oprah. She plays, essentially, a self-help guru, which seems to me an awful lot like her talk-show-host. Her character certainly has almost nothing to do with Mrs. Which in the movie; the only thing they have in common is that the movie Mrs. Which also has some difficulty materializing completely, and so her legs tend to be translucent.
After the movie last night I listened to some other viewers talking in the theater. A woman was talking to her daughter about how she found Oprah unconvincing in this role, even though she knew Oprah could act, because she’s done some excellent acting in other movies. I agreed entirely. Oprah is in this movie because she’s famous; she’s a big draw. She may be in this movie for “representation,” too, although I don’t think she was needed for that. And so her presence in this movie is more distracting than helpful.
The other two “misses” just don’t have enough lines to show much character development, and unfortunately they don’t seem to have any particular chemistry together, as my wife Grace pointed out, as a trio. They don’t really play off of each other; they mostly stand in a semicircle and take turns reading their lines. And Witherspoon in particular seems “off” as Mrs. Which, because she is strangely hostile to Meg. This seems odd given that so much of what the “misses,” and the movie, are doing serves to build up Meg’s confidence.
Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium is an odd choice, and I’m not going to hazard a guess as to why he was chosen. He is inoffensive in this role. The Happy Medium was a woman in the book, but there’s no strong reason why she has to be. I was a little puzzled by the comedic bits. The Happy Medium is a partially comic character, but it seems to undercut the sense of reality of the movie when he refers to himself as a “weirdo living in a cave.” I don’t think this helps viewers retain their suspension of disbelief. Still, his character shows a lot of empathy with Meg, and so I can’t really complain about this casting choice.
Next up, I need to talk about one of the movie’s biggest failings: its failure to maintain a convincing sense of place.
What We’re Looking At
When I showed up for my first screening, I was expecting that the “tesseract” effect might look any number of ways. I expected it might look a bit like the famed watery event horizon effect from the Stargate franchise. I thought it might look like a Star Trek transporter effect. I thought it might look like Tony Shalhoub traveling by “gel pod” in Galaxy Quest.
I wasn’t really prepared to see, or rather not see, Meg blundering around in near-complete darkness, smothered by sheer fabric. I’ll say this: DuVernay definitely achieved something different here. If film is the art of painting with light, in these bits DuVernay was instead painting with darkness. It wasn’t until my second viewing that I felt like I could make sense of this. (Who could have guessed that a special effect shot mostly without any light would be hard for the audience to interpret?)
At first I thought it was a reference to the scene in the book where the children materialize on a two-dimensional planet and are squashed flat; the “misses” have to tesser them away immediately, realizing that the children can’t survive in two dimensions. But that isn’t it at all. Then I thought this might be a reference to the scene in the book where Meg tessers through the “dark thing” and is nearly frozen to death. But no, that isn’t it either. (DuVernay really confused the crap out of me here, I must say).
Meg simply has trouble tessering. In the movie, this is apparently she doesn’t love herself enough; she isn’t fully comfortable in her own skin, and doesn’t feel much desire to return to normal existence as herself. I think many of us can identify with that. And so this is why, the first few times she tessers, she doesn’t see anything, she feels smothered in darkness, and winds up lying on the ground stunned by the shock of returning to her own body.
This realization helps make sense of Meg’s final tesser, in which we see her, in slow motion, lit by soft colors, floating through scrims of fabric, face filled with rapture. After defeating “the It,” she’s also defeated her own self-loathing. She’s able to enjoy tessering, and floats across billions of light years like a thistledown on a spring breeze.
In my first review I called out this dramatic inconsistency as a confusing failure. But it actually makes sense. It’s the same theatrical, arty travel effect every time; it’s just that in Meg’s first few tries, we can’t see anything. I can see now what DuVernay was going for here; I’m just not sure it really works very well, at least not without a second viewing. The warping of reality as the tesser starts seems over-done, while the actual travel by tesseract seems under-done.
When we meet Mrs. Who, she’s in a “haunted house,” filled with impossible teetering stacks of books. These stacks look bad. They are quite obviously glued or bolted together to keep the stacks from falling over. Right off the bat I felt that the filmmakers in this scene were announcing that they had no respect for books and would damage and destroy them to make amusing props. It seemed like Mrs. Who was sculpting with the books, not reading them. That seemed an ominous sign for a movie conspicuously based on a beloved book. Let’s hope they were fake books created for the movie.
The planet Uriel, with the color-graded grass and floating flowers, is pretty. Mrs. Whatsit’s flying lettuce leaf is pretty. But the outdoor scenes feel stitched-together, with little convincing sense of place. Especially on the Happy Medium’s planet, it’s painfully clear that the actors are walking across a green screen.
When Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace ride on lettuce-leaf Mrs. Whatsit’s back, they throw themselves up into the air and fly themselves, flying along on their own, a few feet above her. Now, I don’t expect everyone who works on a movie to have a background in physics, but this is ludicrous. Let’s say you find yourself riding on top of a plane, holding on for dear life. You decide to throw yourself up into the air, letting go of the plane. What will happen to you? I think even a child would find this unconvincing.
I find a lot of the sets unconvincing. The scenes inside the Happy Medium’s cave place Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin, and all the “misses” on crystals, balancing themselves to keep from falling into unknown depths. This is a bit hard to swallow. Do all the people who visit the Happy Medium have to take their lives into their hands? Does he risk death to move around his own home? If this is his drawing room, what does his bathroom look like? Even for a weirdo who lives in a cave, that seems a touch unbelievable. And the crystal cave looks bad. This scene looks like it was filmed inside a dusty diorama you might find in a natural history museum.
There’s little sense of how much time is passing between scenes, and little sense of how much time is passing back on Earth while the characters are elsewhere. No one mentions this, except for the way that Meg’s father is shocked to realize that four years have passed on Earth while he’s been away. But it never seems to occur to the characters to wonder what is happening back on Earth and how long they will be gone. Because of this, there’s little sense of urgency to the story at all. This kills any possible “edge-of-the-seat” feeling completely dead.
Camazotz
When Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace arrive on Camazotz, they materialize in a cornfield, which immediately turns into a forest. Then the forest is immediately assaulted with some sort of giant tornado-like vortex. The changing landscape, and this giant storm, have no basis in the book at all. This giant storm, uprooting and throwing trees in the air, has no explanation in the movie. It exists to provide excitement, apparently, and to give Meg something to show off; she convinces Calvin to trust her and climb inside a tree stump, which is then thrown through the air and lands safely away from the vortex. They emerge completely uninjured.
It’s about as convincing, physics-wise, as the scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in which Indy survives an atomic blast by hiding in a refrigerator. (And this movie’s about physics).
In the book, Camazotz is a planet, populated by humans. The planet Camazotz is ruled by “IT,” the giant brain. Camazotz is under the influence of a vague, faceless evil spreading throughout the universe, called “The Black Thing” or “The Dark Thing.”
The movie muddles these things somewhat. “IT” is called “the It” throughout the movie, which seems like the ultimate unnecessary change. In the book, on Uriel, Mrs. Whatsit, in her angelic shape, shows the children a spreading, cancer-like shadow:
What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort? Meg’s hand holding the blossoms slowly dropped and it seemed as though a knife gashed through her lungs. She gasped, but there was no air for her to breathe. Darkness glazed her eyes and mind, but as she started to fall into unconsciousness her head dropped down into the flowers which she was still clutching; and as she inhaled the fragrance of their purity her mind and body revived, and she sat up again.
The shadow was still there, dark and dreadful.
Calvin held her hand strongly in his, but she felt neither strength nor reassurance in his touch. Beside her a tremor went through Charles Wallace, but he sat very still He shouldn’t be seeing this. Meg thought. This is too much for so little a boy, no matter how different and extraordinary a little boy. Calvin turned, rejecting the dark Thing that blotted out the light of the stars. “Make it go away, Mrs. Whatsit,” he whispered. “Make it go away. It’s evil.”
In the movie, Mrs. Who calls this spreading darkness “Camazotz.” This has a lot of repercussions—it means that Camazotz is no longer clearly a planet, and so has no shape, or sense of place. A lot of the vagueness of the story follows from this decision. Before the children tesser to Camazotz, the action takes place on what are recognizably specific planets. After that, things get vague. The transformation from cornfield to forest, and the sudden arrival of the giant, unexplained tornado, suggest that things are illusory, and changing. After the children arrive in the suburban neighborhood, things start to transform in earnest.
The children no longer walk from “place” to “place” while “on” or “in” Camazotz, even though they have just apparently spent quite some time walking through fields and woods. Instead, from this point on, the children mostly stay in one place and Camazotz changes around them. The suburban homes start to fold up, as if they are being put away until they are needed again. But there’s nothing at all in the book to suggest that the cul-de-sac homes of Camazotz are false, or illusory.
There’s no justification for this in the original story at all. In the book, Camazotz is full of people living in a totalitarian state. In the movie, Camazotz is actually populated by only “the It,” Meg’s father, and the man with red eyes, who isn’t fully real, but some sort of puppet. Because the people aren’t real, there’s no solidarity needed or available. There’s no collective fight against “the It.” There’s only one person to save. That certainly simplifies the story, but it entirely removes the inverted-totalitarianism, dystopian aspect of the story. Even on a second viewing, I kept thinking of what a great opportunity DuVernay and the screenwriters had, to link Meg’s struggle for adult identity with the story of enforced conformity under “the It.” It still seems like a huge missed opportunity.
If we’re in a computer simulation, or an entirely magical world that can change at a whim, if anything at all can happen next, then there’s little significance to what happens. The movie starts playing tennis with the net down. The stakes are lowered. Our viewing become passive, because as modern audiences we’re accustomed to wild visual effects, and with no sense that the story is real, we have only dull curiosity over what special effects the filmmakers are going to show us next.
When Meg defeats “the It,” something happens—it’s not clear what happens, or how. But Meg and Charles Wallace are left standing… somewhere, watching streamers of light. The streamers of light might be comets; they might be the neurons of “the It,” burning up. There’s light getting in to what was darkness, and so the “misses” can tesser in, and Meg can tesser out. But she’s standing on a stage; there’s no sense of place at all. This again, to me, simplifies and abstracts the story beyond recognition, and removes the emotional impact from this sequence. We’re suddenly watching, rather self-consciously, a play instead of a movie. If it had been a play all along, we could very well be deeply invested, emotionally, in the story at this point. But the transition is jarring.
In my first review, I rambled on at some length about how the movie deletes some elements while keeping others, and the stray elements they keep no longer make sense. I cited two specific examples: the audible “beat” of Camazotz, which shows up first in the scene where the children are bouncing basketballs, and the reference to “Aunt Beast.” I’m not going to belabor these things further here; read more about it in the first review, below, if you care to. But I’ll just say that this “incomplete deletion” remains puzzling for those who haven’t read the book, and annoying for those who have. Valuable screen time is wasted on story elements that are “orphaned,” and don’t connect up to anything else.
Erasing Calvin
Calvin (the white male character) has his role considerably diminished; he becomes stupider. He doesn’t get very many lines. Almost his entire role in the movie is to stare, goggle-eyed, at Meg, and to tell her how amazing she is, and that he loves her hair. That’s “empowering” for girls, I suppose. His character achieves nothing else.
You might argue that this is exactly how most female characters in typically sexist books and movies work. I agree with that entirely. But is the solution to two-dimensional, sexist characters really to simply “flip the script?”
Calvin’s difficult relationship with his family is profoundly changed. In the book, Calvin’s family is poor. Calvin is the third child of eleven children, who are neglected. Calvin is rapidly growing and his family can’t afford clothes for him, so his pants are often too short for his legs. There’s a bit of back-story in which the school principal actually purchases new shoes for Calvin, but scuffs them up before giving them to him, so he can claim they are a used pair. It would have taken only a minute or two of screen time to set up more back-story for Calvin.
Through the character of Calvin, the book demonstrates class consciousness. In the movie, Calvin has a troubled relationship with his family, but all we learn of it is that his father is domineering and demanding. This effectively deletes just about all class consciousness from the movie; everyone seems comfortably upper middle-class, with the exception of one older black man, who is shown as a victim of bullying and torment.
Destroying Dad
The movie “Disney-fies” Meg’s father; that for her to grow, he has to shrink. This is in keeping with television shows like iCarly and Hannah Montana. I consider this to be a serious problem with Disney’s portrayal of parents in general. Do any Disney films ever feature a competent parent?
Despite her enormous love for her father, early in the movie, near the end of the movie Meg perceives him as a selfish coward. Throughout the film so far, Meg has maintained great pride in her father: in his genius, and in his work. But at the end of the film, and a confusing moment, she seems to require him to apologize for leaving her.
Did her father do something wrong? Was his desire to “shake hands with the universe” a form of selfishness? Aren’t these the very qualities that help make him heroic, an inspiration?
It feels to me like the movie had to make him look selfish and weak, because the movie is so profoundly about Meg, and her needs, that it must literally make everything “all about her.”
Never mind that Meg’s father was trapped on or in Camazotz, held hostage against his will. Did we require the American hostages in Iran to apologize to their families when they were finally returned home? I forget.
After Dad’s abject apology, Meg seems to be willing to allow herself to love him again, but it feels like it’s a profoundly weakened kind of love.
If DuVernay didn’t intend this, then something went badly wrong with this scene. If she did, then it’s a disturbing choice which should have been more carefully thought out. It doesn’t seem to fit with Meg’s father’s character as portrayed either in the book, or in the movie up to this point.
No one ever holds Meg to account for her unreasonable demands here. This is so profoundly Meg’s story that her faults can only be seen as virtues. I don’t think that’s really a good way to help her develop.
Glittering Prize
In my first review, I wrote at length about the “misses” and their makeup and costumes. After my second viewing, I feel a bit less critical of this aspect of the movie. This is because I noticed something I missed the first time. The three witches all have glittering eyeshadow. Mrs. Which (Winfrey) also has glittering lip-gloss. In my first viewing, I found this to be overly silly. I also griped about how, in Meg’s final tesser, she has confetti and glitter blowing into her face. I watched this scene more closely the second time, and realized that there’s a visual pun going on here. The eyes of the “misses” are glittering because they literally have stars in their eyes. When Meg finally lets herself go and is able to tesser freely, the glitter collects against her closed eyelids. So Meg winds up with stars in her eyes, as well.
I still think that near-constant costume changes are a needless distraction, but at least I’ve found a point to the eyeshadow and glitter.
The witches are interesting in the book in part because they don’t seem supernatural, until they are revealed to be beings of enormous power. Making the witches exotically beautiful and elaborately coiffed and dressed from the get-go discards the idea that Meg has to learn to understand that they are not just weirdos, but beings “through whom God extends his Grace.” They are unpreposessing in the book, initially, but the children discover that they are actually angels.
In the movie adaptation, the witches start out as powerful beings. They aren’t angels, because there is no God in the movie. They are New Age figures, spiritual warriors. And not necessarily peaceful, or non-violent warriors. We don’t see them fighting evil with violence, but in the litany of great lights, Jesus is removed, but Nelson Mandela—not a non-violent activist—is added.
This is profoundly disconnected from L’Engle’s Christian vision of the witches as angels. And so, in several ways, the story as presented in the movie now embodies the things that evangelical Christians have long criticized the book for. And so in a way the adaptation actually slanders the book.
There’s even a bizarre moment in which Charles Wallace, flying on lettuce-leaf-Mrs.-Whatsit’s back, runs his hands along giant Oprah’s face, feeling her flawlessly smooth skin. It’s an act of worship. In the book, there’s a moment in which, when Mrs. Whatsit changes into her centaur-like form, Calvin falls to his knees and begins to worship her. She tells him specifically not to do this, and orders him to stand up, because she’s pointing Calvin at God, not to herself. But in the movie, with no God in the picture, there’s no reason in the movie why the kids shouldn’t worship them. And they don’t discourage this form of attention.
With Liberty and Neoliberalism for All!
I want to be clear: I think the changes made in adapting A Wrinkle in Time are changes made as part of a neoliberal agenda: to break down families, and get kids to believe in the culture of individualism, success, and personal empowerment over all traditional solidarity, family and religious values. And the feminist values embodied in the movie are the values of a feminism entirely corrupted and co-opted by neoliberal capitalism.
Everything about the changes made to A Wrinkle in Time, adapting it to film, serve to make it slide neatly into the neoliberal value system. Believe in yourself; invest in yourself. Get a degree in a STEM field. Be empowered. Lean in. God isn’t necessary. We worship the market, and sometimes Oprah (it’s a bit vague, but whatever, as long as “the spirit in me honors the spirit in you.”)
We’ve got a black woman directing a hundred-million dollar movie. We’ve got a young woman of color in a leading role. This is wonderful. We’ve got a rainbow of women as the “misses.” It’s exciting. Young black women will see themselves represented on screen in a positive way.
Yes!
And also, no.
I believe, I think, in everything the director Ava DuVernay claims to be trying to achieve, in this movie.
In telling the “small story,” she’s achieved a pretty good movie. It’s got some great emotional beats, and some beautiful scenes, although it is muddled and confusing here and there, and so the sum is often less than the parts.
But what she’s actually done to the book, and to L’Engle’s message and legacy, I really don’t like very much at all. After my second viewing, and a lot of thought, I don’t feel as angry about it, but I still feel very dissatisfied.
DuVernay’s made a movie from the belly of the capitalist beast—Disney. It’s “diverse.” It’s “anti-racist.” It’s also anti-Christian, anti-feminist, anti-male, neoliberal propaganda. It takes almost everything interesting from the beloved book it is based on, and muddles, misunderstands, dilutes, deletes, or destroys it. It’s frustrating to review this movie, because parts of it work on an emotional level. Many people who saw it have found themselves tearing up at the tear-jerking scenes between Meg and her father. I did as well. But the strange failures in storytelling, undercut it at every turn.
If you think I’m exaggerating when I say that perhaps DuVernay didn’t really understand or care all that much about the source material, preferring to co-opt the enormous popularity of the original to tell the story she wanted to tell, consider this interview in Vulture:
“Throughout the film, we tried to take what Madeleine L’Engle intended and push it even further in terms of a contemporary context,” said DuVernay, who cast the young actress Storm Reid as Meg, the biracial daughter of two scientist parents played by Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. DuVernay’s Meg continues to shrink within herself if anyone so much as mentions her curly hair, but her self-image in this fantasy film is subtly informed by the reality of being black and female. “Hair is a big deal for black women,” said DuVernay. “There’s the European standard of beauty that we’re all exposed to and bombarded with that says, My hair needs to look like a Caucasian woman’s hair: straight.”
I’m married to one black woman and the father of another. As the guy who has to pay for their salon visits, and hear them argue and complain about their hair, I’m at least dimly aware of how fraught hair is, to black women. And so I don’t think it’s a misstep to have Calvin appreciate Meg’s hair a couple of times during the movie, and to have Meg gradually able to accept the compliment. But I don’t think it is fair to the source material to make this almost the only function the character of Calvin serves in the movie. I don’t think that actually “pushes even further” what Madeleine L’Engle intended. It flattens Calvin into the second dimension, and as in the book, he can’t survive this sort of treatment.
The same article continues:
DuVernay mentioned a key scene in the film where Meg holds out her hand to Calvin and asks her to trust him, and the young man does, following Meg into the face of danger. “Tell me where you’ve seen that before,” said DuVernay. “If half of the executives and crew members in this town saw that as a boy, maybe they wouldn’t doubt so much that a black woman could lead. It feels slight, but we know what images do and we know the power that they have.”
Again, that motive doesn’t seem wrong to me. But does she need to manufacture the disjointed tornado scene completely, with no justification for it in the original book, and laughable physics, in order to create a place for this scene to happen? (There are lots of points in the story, especially on Camazotz, where a similar sequence could have fit naturally into the story).
Continued the filmmaker, “There’s all these seeds I wanted to plant. I don’t have children; I’ll never have children by choice. But to be able to say something in this film to children of all ages…” DuVernay trailed off, then found her voice. “It was irresistible to me,” she said.
DuVernay used A Wrinkle in Time to tell the story she wanted to tell, not the story L’Engle wrote. The chance to do this was “irresistible.” She had good motives, she had mostly a positive agenda. But in the process she damaged the reputation of the book, distressed fans of the book, damaged the reputation of the book’s author, and told a somewhat confused and muddled, although touching, story.
And in the process she made, and by extension Disney made, one of my absolute favorite books, a book I read again and again as a child and loved, and read again, as an adult, to my children, into a movie that really wasn’t made for me.
She’s pretty clear about this, in this interview in Collider:
This film is for 8 to 12-year-olds. That’s the sweet spot for it. Hopefully, other people will go out and enjoy it, but that’s who I made it for.
I’ve had a bit of a hard time coming to grips with that. Because I really don’t think it had to be that way. The original wasn’t so narrowly targeted. See this article in Smithsonian Magazine:
Wrinkle received the Newbery Award, a prestigious children’s literature award, in 1963. But L’Engle herself said that she didn’t understand the difference between a children’s and an adult novel.
“People underestimate children,” she said during a panel of children’s writers. “They think you have to write differently. You don’t. You just have to tell a story.”
And in this interview for Scholastic, she is asked “if you had to choose between writing for children and writing for adults, which would you pick?” She answers:
I don’t see any difference. I write exactly the same—the best I can. If a book is going to be marketed toward children, the main character is usually a child. But the writing is the same. Some people think that writing for children is easier, but it isn’t. In some ways it’s harder—children are very complex. And you have to be absolutely faithful to them—you can’t cheat.
DuVernay chose to tailor the story to children—to simplify it. She didn’t have trust in her audience that L’Engle did, and it shows. In fact, L’Engle believed that not only should she not “dumb down” her stories for children, she should trust them with her most challenging ideas. In L’Engle’s obituary from 2007, The Guardian reported that:
Increasingly she [L’Engle] found that she preferred children as an audience, saying, “When I’m asked why I write at least half of my books for children, especially since my first books were for adults, I answer, truthfully, that when I have something to say which I think is going to be too difficult for adults, I write a book for children.”
It was this trust and confidence that L’Engle placed in her audience that made the original book so well-loved by children like me. And I think L’Engle’s story of universal love and compassion was big enough to contain the parts of Meg’s story that DuVernay wanted to tell, and more, if not all, of the story that L’Engle wrote. I don’t think they actually needed to be in conflict. L’Engle’s story was inclusive enough, ecumenical enough, and open enough that there was no need for conflict.
Where DuVernay finds conflict, it seems to me that it is because DuVernay’s intolerant, parochial neoliberalism would not stretch to encompass L’Engle’s beautiful, expansive story. Lacking faith in her audience, DuVernay targeted the movie narrowly, and in doing so, she shrank L’Engle’s story. And so she took from it what she wanted to take, leaving most of what I love about the original book behind, and made that big, generous story into something small. This is what it means when we say that an artist doesn’t have faith in her audience. L’Engle had it, and DuVernay doesn’t. L’Engle’s work was ground-breaking, and still is; but apparently the world still isn’t ready, or at least DuVernay and Disney didn’t think the world was ready, for an adaptation as big and awe-inspiring as the book.
I’m a fifty-year-old white male. My generation is not important, as far as audience share goes, any more. The movie may work reasonably well with the target demographic. My daughter Veronica is 13 years old and multi-ethnic. She enjoyed it, and she’s clearly square in the middle of the target demographic. But she said she felt like there were scenes missing, and that important stuff must have been cut out.
There’s evidence that the movie’s creators knew they had a mess on their hands, and so felt the need to prepare the audience. So the movie actually opens with the director introducing herself and showing some “making of” footage with group shots of all the production crew, as if to say—hey, these are some of the wonderful people who worked so very hard for you to make this movie. You wouldn’t want to hurt them, now would you?
I’m afraid it just doesn’t work that way. The movie must stand or fall on its own. That form of argument is a logical fallacy, called “special pleading.”
There will probably be a Director’s Cut, there will probably be commentary, and probably at least a few deleted scenes. I’m really quite curious about those, and what they might reveal about how this movie came to be the way it is. If DuVernay ever wants to tell that story, I’d like to listen. If she goes full Hillary, blaming the movie’s poor reviews on everyone except herself, I’m much less interested. So perhaps it’s best not to care too much what she has to say about it, and wait to see what she makes next. I really hope it’s better.
My original review follows, for anyone interested enough to read both and see how my thinking changed after re-watching the movie.
More in Anger Than in Sorrow: My First Review of Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time
I finished this review just prior to seeing the movie for the second time. After watching it again, I felt compelled to write a second review. Read the second review first.
It’s a laughable cliché for people like me—a white male member of Generation X—to complain about a modern adaptation of a work that we loved in childhood. I believe one whiny phrase is “they ruined my childhood.”
For the most part I believe that great books are, ultimately, impervious to such “ruining.” A bad movie adaptation may lodge in the minds of its viewers and to some extent displace the original, but the original is still there, waiting to be discovered again by every new generation.
But this blog is called “The Books That Wrote Me,” and in it I’ve written about hundreds of books, albums, movies, and even television shows that I believe shaped my values and world view. And I would be hard-pressed to name a single book that I felt was more formative of my early values, and especially my aspirations and longings, than A Wrinkle in Time. So I’m going to risk sounding like that guy.
The director Ava DuVernay, and writers Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, have made a concerted effort to destroy the reputation of A Wrinkle in Time. They have slandered Madeleine L’Engle. They have at ever step made egregious decisions to weaken and undermine the messages of the book. They have damaged L’Engle’s legacy.
In the days I’ve been working on this review, I’ve become aware that the estate of Harper Lee is suing the producers of the Broadway version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
The lawsuit was filed after estate representative Tonja B. Carter read the script of the play written by Aaron Sorkin.
The estate says that some characters are altered. This includes protagonist Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of rape.
I think it is unlikely that this lawsuit will succeed, and I don’t think it should succeed—this would certainly have a chilling effect on adaptation. But I think it very well may true that that the estate has a strong moral case against the producers, because making egregious changes to the characters of the novel could in fact reflect badly on the intentions of the author.
Before seeing A Wrinkle in Time, I don’t think I would have been nearly as willing to imagine that such a lawsuit may, in fact, be reasonable and justified.
Then I saw A Wrinkle in Time.
Most mediocre movies don’t really inspire me to think about them all that much. They quickly fade from my memory. I might write a review, make a few comments, or have a few conversations. But a week or two later, I likely won’t be thinking about the movie anymore. A good example is Thor:Ragnarok. It’s a flawed movie, and I could talk about it more, but there’s not much point, because not all that much thinking went into it. I had fun watching it, and my daughter had fun. That’s all we hoped for.
In the case of A Wrinkle in Time, I find myself unable to simply let it go until I’ve worked out more fully what I think about it. When I left the theater I felt genuinely confused. I was moved by the movie; I found myself welling up in tears in a couple of the more touching scenes. But there were so many problems. The text, it seemed to me, was more disrespected in this adaptation than just about any other I can think of. And the more I rethink it, the more the adaptation seems not just fractally bad: bad at different magnification levels—but pernicious, an act of sabotage or vandalism.
I didn’t feel this way about Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, even though that beloved children’s story was cynically bloated out to a giant turd of a trilogy, stuffed with violence and inventions nowhere to be found in the original. That, it seemed to me, was simply an ordinary money grab. This seems like a piece of—yes, I will say it—propaganda.
It’s going to take me a while to unpack this, so settle in for a long read. Or close your browser tab now and write me off as a crank; I don’t particularly care.
The Book
A Wrinkle in Time is a relatively short book, but deeper and more complex than one might expect given its length.
The main characters can be roughly broken down as “unhappy, nerdy, awkward, and easy to relate to” (Meg), “good-hearted, more of a jock than a nerd, with a troubled family life, but still easy to relate to” (Calvin), and “extremely nerdy, and hard for most people to relate to” (Charles Wallace). I think this was an important feature of the book, as it allowed a variety of different young readers to identify with one or another of the characters.
Meg is indifferent to school:
At school Meg was tired and her eyelids sagged and her mind wandered. In social studies she was asked to name the principal imports and exports of Nicaragua, and though she had looked them up dutifully the evening before, now she could remember none of them. The teacher was sarcastic, the rest of the class laughed, and she flung herself down in her seat in a fury. “Who cares about the imports and exports of Nicaragua, anyhow?” she muttered.
Calvin has “compulsions” that tell him what to do. He’s an unusually empathic kid:
Calvin tried now politely to direct his words toward Meg as well as Charles Wallace, “When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can’t explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn’t happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That’s all I know, kid. I’m not holding anything back. Maybe it’s because I’m supposed to meet you. You tell me.”
And Charles Wallace is… well, Charles Wallace is nearly unique in literature. In modern parlance, you might call him an “indigo child.”
“Charles Wallace understands more than the rest of us, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because he’s—well, because he’s different, Meg.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not quite sure. You know yourself he’s not like anybody else.”
“No, And I wouldn’t want him to be,” Meg said defensively.
“Wanting doesn’t have anything to do with it. Charles Wallace is what he is. Different. New.”
“New?”
“Yes. That’s what your father and I feel.”
The book is not Christian allegory precisely, but it is inspired by L’Engle’s inclusive Christian vision about light fighting against darkness played out across the whole history of the universe. The book mentions Jesus and includes quotations from the bible, but it’s been frequently banned because Christians objected to the inclusive, even universal, ecumenical liberalism of L’Engle’s Christianity:
“…some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it’s a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it’s done so well.”
“Who have our fighters been?” Calvin asked.
“Oh, you must know them, dear,” Mrs. Whatsit said.
Mrs. Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
“Jesus!” Charles Wallace said. “Why, of course, Jesus!”
“Of course!” Mrs. Whatsit said. “Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They’ve been lights for us to see by.”
“Leonardo da Vinci?” Calvin suggested tentatively. “And Michelangelo?”
“And Shakespeare,” Charles Wallace called out, “and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!”
Now Calvin’s voice rang with confidence. “And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!”
Jesus is at the top of the list, but that’s apparently not enough for some critics who aren’t comfortable with the other “lights” being associated with the light. And it’s stated that this fight extends throughout the universe—which brings up the theological question of whether life on other planets needs, and/or has, its own savior, or whether it shares ours. That’s not a question I want to tackle today, and apparently one that a lot of evangelicals would prefer to avoid as well; hence, the book gets banned.
And as I will discuss below, the Christian elements in this book are apparently also controversial for DuVernay and the movie’s writers, who took startling liberties with the source material.
You can read about a case in which this controversy played out for teacher Cathy Smith here. She was forbidden to teach the book:
Having enthusiastically taught A Wrinkle in Time twice, I was dismayed when the Education Committee and Board of my school removed this novel from the curriculum because of concerns expressed by parents over its alleged New Age content. Hurt and angry, especially because this book had been my preferred choice and had been approved only two years earlier, I tried to fight back. I marshalled my literary and theological defenses. The result was a mere skirmish. After a polite hearing, it was over.
But let’s look at some of the objections that have been raised about the book. Smith writes:
The inclusion of witches in A Wrinkle in Time is another aspect of the novel that arouses suspicion in the eyes of some readers. The witches have been compared to New Age spirit guides. But clearly the witches are images of angels. On the planet Uriel Calvin attempts to bow down and worship Mrs. Whatsit as she transforms her physical appearance. She warns, “Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.”
And:
L’ Engle is highly opposed to Christians being judgmental about how and through whom God extends his grace, something Meg must learn, too. The beasts, whose outer appearance is revolting, are actually good and kind. The witches are really angels. Much as we would like matters to be black and white, they are not always so in this fallen world, as Jesus himself points out when he leads his disciples to see that the widow’s mite is a worthier contribution than the hefty donation of the rich man.
I’m going to come back to these ideas, below.
Instantaneous travel is possible in the book, achieved by taking a shortcut through a higher dimension, using a “tesseract,” or “tessering.” L’Engle did not invent the word “tesseract,” although I think she is probably responsible for verbifying the noun. A tesseract is a geometric, mathematical object: we imagine that we have four spatial dimensions instead of three, and then imagine what a four-dimensional cube might look like. We can’t really see the fourth-dimensional extension of this cube, but we see a “shadow” of the cube in three dimensions, similar to the way a three-dimensional cube has a two-dimensional shadow.
Reading A Wrinkle in Time as a kid got me into studying higher-dimensional mathematical objects and ideas from topology. I can’t say it was the single thing that got me interested in these topics, but it was sure one of them.
The 3 “witches” that appear in the book are eventually revealed to be stars that have sacrificed themselves, deliberately blowing themselves up to fight evil. They are billions of years old, and they have given up their stellar bodies, although they still exist as spiritual beings who can take human form (with greater or lesser degrees of success). This idea, that they were once stars, doesn’t make it into the film, although we do learn that the “witches” are billions of years old.
The TV show Andromeda borrowed some of these ideas for the character Trance Gemini, who is also a star in humanoid form. In Andromeda, her ability to fold time and space is even called a “tesseract.” That series becomes disastrously bad and muddled, so I can’t really recommend it, but just mention it only to give an example of how L’Engle’s ideas have been borrowed by other writers
The planet of Camazotz is an allegory of the post-war suburban build-out, and the culture of conformity in these suburbs. A Wrinkle in Time was written in 1959-1960 and published in 1962, and so the post-war suburbia was still a pretty new development. To get a little sense for the culture, consider how it was portrayed in the first few episodes of Mad Men, but take it back a few years, so realize that L’Engle’s world view and concerns were somewhat different from a 2018 world view in ways that might be a bit difficult to understand.
The Trailer
A few years back I saw the 2003 film adaptation. It was not impressive, although I recall that it had some neat visuals. I was excited to see the trailer in the theater, a few months ago; I had not heard that the movie was in development. There’s a scene where Meg explains the tesseract to Calvin, using an “ant walking along a string” analogy, and the dialogue in that scene is almost straight out of the book. There’s a clip of the children bouncing basketballs in rhythm in the suburban cul-de-sac on Camazotz that looked like it was a very straightforward rendering of the scene in the book. They looked good! I was encouraged to believe this might be a good movie and a reasonably faithful adaptation.
However, my skepticism was triggered, too, for several reasons: first, it’s a Disney production, and so I had to immediately assume that it would be dumbed down, robbed of emotional weight, and otherwise “Disney-fied” into blandness. Disney is not known for quality portrayals of female characters, and they have a tendency to represent parents badly.
Second, the invisible staircase sequence inside a giant ping-pong ball suggested that they were going to set scenes in abstract or simulated places, which doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the tone of the book
Then, there were the three witches. In the trailer, we see Oprah with jewels glued to her forehead, bleached blond hair, and sparkling silver lip gloss. We see Reese Witherspoon with green lips and orange hair wearing… a bunch of leaves, maybe? And Mindy Kaling, also heavily made up. And… Zach Galifianakis, in some kind of yoga pose, wearing eye shadow and a shirt with one sleeve, saying “do I look like I’m kidding?” while Kaling and Witherspoon smirk at each other.
Oh, no.
Then we see the witches in more outfits, which vary, ostentatiously, from scene to scene. And then, the now-infamous giant flying lettuce leaf, which I have to admit, I found intriguing; I liked the idea of a flying plant creature that looked like it had been painted. And in the trailer, there was a version of the song “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics—a favorite of old people like me. And there was some kind of cataclysmic tornado, knocking down trees—what? And we saw, briefly, the man with red eyes, which looked cool as hell.
So, I was both curious and a little dismayed, but I thought I’d probably take the kids to see the movie. One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn as a parent is that there isn’t really any may to simply imprinting my aesthetics on my children; they enjoy what they enjoy, even things that I don’t enjoy. But I thought, given the source material, they probably would enjoy the movie, even if it wasn’t a great movie. I probably wouldn’t hate it. We could talk about it. And it would probably get them to re-read the book.
It turned out to be, for me, more complicated than that.
My thoughts upon leaving the theater were swirling and murky. There were many things I liked about the movie, and many I didn’t.
Representation
…is important.
Wikipedia tells me that with “a production budget of $100 million, the film became the first live-action film with a nine-digit budget to be directed by a woman of color.” That’s a nice milestone, although I don’t think there is a direct correlation between budget and quality of the final product in movie-making. And often, I see an inverse correlation, because the people behind large investments like conservative choices, and conservative choices rarely produce a really great movie.
Right off the bat, we know that Ava DuVernay has made some unconventional choices with the casting, and is making a stand for representation of people of color in movies. That’s all well and good, and I have no objections to it whatsoever. The original book isn’t really about the races of the characters.
Let me just make this as clear as possible: Storm Reid does a great job as Meg Murry. She was a great casting pick. And Deric McCabe (who is Filipino, although I didn’t really notice that until I read about it) does a great job as Charles Wallace Murry.
It’s a bit strange to make Charles Wallace adopted, because in the book Charles Wallace is a genius because he’s the even-more-brilliant progeny of two geniuses, but it’s not a big element in the movie, and if it makes some adopted child happy to see representation of an adopted character in this movie, that’s great.
Actors Versus Characters
A number of reviewers have complained about McCabe as Charles Wallace. For example, in this podcast from Slate, the reviewers are unkind to McCabe.
I’m here to defend the actor. To clarify: that doesn’t mean I think his character is always fun to watch, but I want to make sure we distinguish here between actor and character. I think we need to stand up for child actors, including Levi Miller as Calvin O’Keefe, and say that if we want to call ourselves the adults, we owe them our support; a lot of child actors have indecently short lives, their fame only resulting in misery.
With child actors especially, they need careful direction and good lines. I think most of what people are reacting to is the character of Charles Wallace as written for him, not the skill of McCabe, and I agree with them to some extent. Charles Wallace even in the book is a difficult character to believe in; child prodigies are always seen that way. And the lines they give him, especially early on in the story, really don’t help. Think of how reviled Jake Lloyd is for his portrayal of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. But recall that Jake Lloyd did not write the line “I hate sand. Its course, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere.” And Jake Lloyd did not direct Jake LLoyd to be whiny and insufferable throughout that movie.
What we’re meant to learn in the early scenes with Charles Wallace is, I think, that Charles Wallace is confounding to the adults around him. He is smarter than all of them—they aren’t actually able to contradict him on this—but you’re not supposed to say that. He has no tact, because he has no experience with social niceties. But he is a staunch defender of his sister, even if his “stanch defense” in front of teachers and other students is a cringe-worthy moment for Meg.
What We’re Looking At
The movie looks cheap and very visually inconsistent. It looks like it cost ten million dollars to make, not ten times that much. It looks like it was shot as a personal project over the course of a number of years with a changing set of art directors and visual artists. Scenes like the Happy Medium’s crystal cave looks bad. This scene looks like it was filmed inside a dusty diorama you might find in a natural history museum. The outdoor scenes feel stitched-together, with little convincing sense of place.
When we meet Mrs. Who, she’s in a “haunted house,” filled with impossible teetering stacks of books. These stacks look bad. They are quite obviously glued or bolted together to keep the stacks from falling over. Right off the bat I felt that the filmmakers in this scene were announcing that they had no respect for books and would damage and destroy them to make amusing props. It seemed like Mrs. Who was sculpting with the books, not reading them. That seemed an ominous sign for a movie conspicuously based on a beloved book. Let’s hope they were fake books created for the movie.
When Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace arrive on Camazotz, they materialize in a cornfield, which immediately turns into a forest. Then the forest is immediately assaulted with some sort of giant tornado-like vortex. The changing landscape, and this giant storm, has no basis in the book at all. This giant storm, uprooting and throwing trees in the air, has no explanation in the movie. It exists to provide excitement, apparently, and to give Meg something to show off; she convinces Calvin to trust her and climb inside a tree stump, which is then thrown through the air and lands safely away from the vortex. They are completely uninjured.
It’s about as convincing, physics-wise, as the scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in which Indy survives an atomic blast by hiding in a refrigerator. And this movie’s about physics.
The way things happen in sets is very confusing, even down to the way the perspective changes between shots in a scene. Many of the sets look quite bad. The viewer rarely has a sense of place, and how places are connected. The children don’t travel from scene to scene on Camazotz; instead, they stay still and Camazotz changes around them. The suburban homes start to fold up, as if they are being put away until they are needed again. But there’s nothing at all in the book to suggest that the cul-de-sac homes of Camazotz are false, or illusory. There’s no story justification for this. If we’re in a computer simulation, or an entirely magical world that can change at a whim, if anything at all can happen next, then there’s little significance to what happens. The movie starts playing tennis with the net down. The stakes are lowered. Our viewing become passive, because as modern audiences we’re accustomed to wild visual effects, and with no sense that the story is real, we have only dull curiosity over what special effects the filmmakers are going to show us next.
That scene I saw in the trailer, with Meg explaining the “wrinkle in time” using a piece of string in a toy ant? Deleted. So there’s no explanation given, except in a strange scene in which Meg’s father makes a fool of himself at a presentation in a science conference, and is laughed at an humiliated.
There’s little sense of how much time is passing between scenes, and little sense of how much time is passing back on Earth while the characters are elsewhere. No one mentions this, except for the way that Meg’s father is shocked to realize that four years have passed on Earth while he’s been away. But it never seems to occur to the characters to wonder what is happening back on Earth and how long they will be gone. Because of this, there’s little sense of urgency to the story at all. This kills any possible “edge-of-the-seat” feeling completely dead.
When Meg tessers back to earth, having finally learned how to do it properly, we see her flying through not stars, planets, and galaxies, but a softly lit, slow-motion space of billowing cloth, sparkles, fog, and confetti. I found this baffling. I was reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. In that film:
There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (that in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city’s interiors.
In that film, Lemmy Caution drives his Ford Galaxie through “sidereal space”—just a freeway, and it’s just called a spaceship. It makes a virtue of the low budget. You get used to it, watching Alphaville, and it’s amusing. It’s not the case, though, that in some parts of the movie the filmmakers worked hard to create exotic sets and visual effects, and in some parts they didn’t, because the inconsistency would be very confusing.
This scene looked like something you would see in a low-budget stage production. Portraying tessering in that abstract and beautiful way would have been an interesting artistic choice, had the movie used it elsewhere. I suppose what I’m saying is this movie could have worked very well as a low-key art film. But it wants to have it both ways. Why do this theatrical thing, only in this one scene? I suspect it might have been a late addition, and maybe there wasn’t any more budget for computer-generated imagery, the rest of it having gone to makeup artists.
Honestly, I feel ridiculous talking about the visual language of film. I’m hardly qualified to discuss it. But Ava DuVernay and her screenwriting team ought to know something about it. This movie doesn’t offer anything to convince me that they do.
Deleting the Beat
To give an example of how the movie references, but wastes, elements from the book, let’s talk about one aspect of the original story: the psychic and audible “beat” of Camazotz.:
Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns. The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door. Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house. In front of all the houses children were playing. Some were skipping rope, some were bouncing balls. Meg felt vaguely that something was wrong with their play. It seemed exactly like children playing around any housing development at home, and yet there was something different about it. She looked at Calvin, and saw that he, too, was puzzled.
“Look!” Charles Wallace said suddenly. “They’re skipping and bouncing in rhythm! Everyone’s doing it at exactly the same moment.”
This was so. As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.
Everwhere Meg and her companions go on Camazotz, there is an insistent sort of psychic “heartbeat.” Sometimes people walk or play to the beat, and it is audible.
“How can they do it?” Meg asked wonderingly. “We couldn’t do it that way if we tried. What does it mean?”
Allegorically, it’s the beat of conformity. Non-conforming children who can’t stick to the beat are dragged off for reprogramming. Even the paperboy delivers newspapers to an inhumanly perfect beat:
…as with the children playing ball and jumping rope, there was something wrong about it. The rhythm of the gesture never varied. The paper flew in identically the same arc at each doorway, landed in identically the same spot. It was impossible for anybody to throw with such consistent perfection.
Charles Wallace, as the most sensitive one, feels this psychic pressure of the “beat” most strongly:
Charles wore his listening, probing look. “They’re not robots,” he said suddenly and definitely. “I’m not sure what they are, but they’re not robots. I can feel minds there. I can’t get at them at all, but I can feel them sort of pulsing.
There’s a moment where he is trying to blot it out, so he tries saying multiplication tables. This strategy fails, though, because it’s too easy to fall into saying the multiplication tables in time with the beat. When Charles Wallace is captured and is overwhelmed by “it”, his eyes “twirl” in rhythm with this psychic “beat.” Then, at the climax of the movie, there is a confrontation with “it.” “It” is the power running Camazotz—a giant brain, literally throbbing. The throbbing of this brain is the “beat” of this pressure to conform.
In the movie, we see the kids bouncing balls and Meg mentions feeling the pressure of this insistent beat in her mind for a few seconds, but it keeps slowing down and speeding up—which makes no sense. Then the kids travel to a different scene and the movie doesn’t ever mention this “beat” again. When Charles Wallace meets the man with red eyes, he gets Charles Wallace to say his multiplication tables but there’s no connection made with the “beat.”
When they finally meet “it,” they are inside some kind of giant blackened brain (Charles Wallace calls it “the darkest mind in the universe”), and they don’t do anything at all with the concept of this “beat.”
Since the movie doesn’t hook this idea up to anything—why introduce it?
The director is using these as offhand references, tossed in to appeal to fans of the original. That’s it. It would have been better to not even use it, if the movie wasn’t going to make it part of the story, because this kind of thing just makes the movie seem disjointed, throwing out ideas that don’t build into anything.
The filmmakers just completely fail to develop a concept of what is going on, on Camazotz. What is going on is fascism in the guise of neoliberal freedom, enforced conformity in the guise of freedom from want, selling illusions.
Why do you think we have wars at home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live their own, separate, individual lives. I’ve been trying to explain to you in the simplest possible way that on Camazotz individuals have been done away with. Camazotz is ONE mind. It’s IT. And that’s why everybody’s so happy and efficient. That’s what old witches like Mrs. Whatsit don’t want to have happen at home."
It makes me wonder—did DuVernay and the writers think that the theme of imposed conformity in the book wasn’t important, and wasn’t worth featuring? Do they think a critique of cultural conformity would have been too offensive, or too controversial? What could possibly justify throwing out such an important aspect of the story?
Deleting the Beast
In the scene with the Happy Medium, he shares a vision where of a planet where there are big furry creatures walking on stilt-like legs. Someone says “there’s Aunt Beast!” And then it’s gone.
That’s a reference to a character in the movie that was filmed, but was deleted late in the production process. “Aunt Beast” is Meg’s name for a gentle but bizarre-looking alien that nurses her back to health. It’s a memorable episode from the book, but I agree that it isn’t strictly necessary for the story the movie wants to tell. I don’t object to deleting it; movie adaptations of novels almost always require significant deletions from the source material, if only to avoid becoming too long.
But since the scene it refers to is gone, it doesn’t work for characters to reference something that happened, but that the movie audience doesn’t get to see. Like the references to the “beat” and the multiplication tables, it exists now as sort of an offhand wave to any viewer who has read the book. It’s as if the director was saying to us “Hi! We know you’re watching! Wasn’t that part of the original story great? But we’re going not going to show it to you!”
If Peter Jackson had done this in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there would still be no scenes with Tom Bombadil, but the hobbits would briefly mention him later. That would (rightfully) be ridiculed as a major continuity error. There’s no reason this should have been left in the movie; it serves only to puzzle people who haven’t read the book, and annoy people who have.
Erasing Calvin
Calvin (the white male character) has his role considerably diminished; he becomes stupider. He doesn’t get very many lines. Almost his entire role in the movie is to stare, goggle-eyed, at Meg, and to tell her how amazing she is, and that he loves her hair. That’s “empowering” for girls, I suppose. His character achieves nothing else.
You might argue that this is exactly how most female characters in typically sexist books and movies work. I agree with that entirely. But is the solution to two-dimensional, sexist characters really to simply “flip the script?”
Calvin’s difficult relationship with his family is profoundly changed. In the book, Calvin’s family is poor. Calvin is the third child of eleven children, who are neglected. Calvin is rapidly growing and his family can’t afford clothes for him, so his pants are often too short for his legs. There’s a bit of back-story in which the school principal actually purchases new shoes for Calvin, but scuffs them up before giving them to him, so he can claim they are a used pair.
Through the character of Calvin, the book demonstrates class consciousness. In the movie, Calvin has a troubled relationship with his family, but all we learn of it is that his father is domineering and demanding. This effectively deletes just about all class consciousness from the movie; everyone seems comfortably upper middle-class, with the exception of one older black man, who is shown as a victim of bullying and torment.
Destroying Dad
The movie “Disney-fies” Meg’s father; that for her to grow, he has to shrink. This is in keeping with television shows like iCarly and Hannah Montana. Do any of them ever feature a competent parent?
Despite her enormous love for her father, early in the movie, near the end of the movie Meg perceives him as a selfish coward. Throughout the film so far, Meg has maintained great pride in her father: in his genius, and in his work. But at the end of the film, and a confusing moment, she seems to require him to apologize for leaving her.
Did her father do something wrong? Was his desire to “shake hands with the universe” a form of selfishness? It feels to me like the movie had to make it that way, because the movie is so profoundly about Meg, and her needs. Never mind that Meg’s father was trapped on or in Camazotz, held hostage against his will. Did we require the American hostages in Iran to apologize to their families when they were finally returned home? I forget.
After Dad’s abject apology, Meg seems to be willing to allow herself to love him again, but it feels like it’s a profoundly weakened kind of love. If DuVernay didn’t intend this, then something went badly wrong with this scene.
In my initial viewing, it seemed like Meg, on her return to earth, was holding her father responsible for abandoning her and Charles Wallace. Meg’s father’s “crime” in the movie is to want to retreat and regroup, to plan strategy and come back to rescue Charles Wallace after they’ve figured out how they might defeat It, which is called “the it” in the movie for some reason. Meg sees this desire to organize to achieve this goal as a sign of weakness, believing that her father is failing Charles Wallace.
Earlier on in the movie, when the Witches (or Misses as they are called in the movie) realize that Meg’s father is on Camazotz, they intend to make a strategic retreat to Earth to come up with a plan. Meg will not agree to this plan, and the three children wind up on Camazotz because of her defiance and refusal to return to earth. But she doesn’t wind up enraged at the witches. She doesn’t turn on them. She doesn’t judge them to be weak and cowardly.
So there’s a strange double-standard going on here, in her response to her father’s plan. It demonizes the men, because the movie’s version of feminism doesn’t allow the women to be in solidarity with the men, and it reinforces the patriarchal values that men have to be brave, even suicidally brave.
It seems like this is a deliberate choice as part of the politics of the movie, but I don’t think the way to liberate women of color in film is to start applying a negative double standard to a white male character for the same behavior.
Deleting Madeleine L’Engle’s Inclusive Christianity
Sometimes the changes feel as if they were intended to offend. Remember that scene in the book, in which the children rattle off the name of Jesus, and the others, who stood for the light? The movie doesn’t simply delete that scene. We get a similar scene, but Jesus is deleted.
Really? The complete removal of Jesus from a movie adapting a book built around a deeply and fundamentally Christian story? That’s a bridge too far for me. The people that made that choice deserve ridicule. I just don’t think there’s a case to be made that the Christian themes are an unimportant and disposable component of the book. I feel grateful that L’Engle is dead, and not alive to see this. And I hope they paid her family a hell of a lot of money.
There’s no intolerance like the intolerance exercised in the name of tolerance.
Instead of including Jesus, the movie extends the list to include Nelson Mandela.
You might consider Mandela a hero, but even if you do, you might acknowledge that he is a different kind of hero. Specifically, he was not a non-violent activist. So he sticks out like a sore thumb. This seems, again, like part of a neoliberal agenda, to rebrand people like Mandela as non-violent activists; it’s like the neoliberal rebranding of Martin Luther King as a capitalist who would like to sell you a truck.
Mark Shea’s commentary in Patheos concludes:
It would be nice if there could be some kind of diversity training for Hollywood, so that the folks there could learn how to at least imaginatively enter into the world of Christian believers rather than just blindly pave it over with the spiritual goop of Affirmations, Feels and Intuitions that tends to be what passes for “spirituality” these days.
On the other hand, given the grotesque witness of what currently passes for Christianity in the US today, one can scarcely blame non-Christians in Hollywood for not wanting to dive into the septic tank on the off chance that they may find a diamond.
But it is heartbreaking that L’Engle’s Christianity, which is not hard to find or understand, was not merely ignored, but buried.
The movie takes the general structure of the source material, but discards the Christian elements completely. I’m not sure why the director thought that was necessary, because L’Engle’s Christianity was not exclusionary or narrow at all, and so it’s hard to see it as anything other than hostility to Christianity on the part of DuVernay, or atheistic screenwriters.
I realize that might make me sound like a Christian crank, and it feels strange to think that, because I haven’t ever really ever considered myself to be that. I don’t proselytize. I’m not evangelical. I barely consider myself a Christian. If I am one, I’m a pretty lousy one. I’m barely even a theist. But I do believe in attempting to live the values of the Gospel. And I believe that tolerance towards theism in general is important, as world religions present, when they are doing things right, a compelling case against hatred and the rampaging destructive force of capitalism, when worship of money replaces any other form of worship.
Philosophically, this kind of thing intolerance presents a conundrum; Karl Popper identified it as the “paradox of tolerance.” Christians must be tolerant of non-Christians, in order for society to maintain the capacity to be tolerant. But it seems that the director and writers of this adaptation simply could not tolerate L’Engle’s Christianity, which deeply permeates the original work. And because of Popper’s paradox, this intolerance is not something I believe we should tolerate, at least not without calling it out.
Fake Feminism
In the movie, the three witches, called the “misses” in the movie, don’t vary in age to reference the classic archetypes of women at different ages (maiden, mother, crone); now they’re all “mothers” (middle-aged). It’s 2018 and the female leads can’t be elderly. They are also all heavily plastered with foundation; it’s 2018 and the female leads can’t have wrinkles. These are profoundly anti-feminist elements to find in a move that allegedly promotes a feminist vision.
In the movie, as Reese Witherspoon (Mrs. Whatsit) changes into her flying lettuce leaf shape, her clothes fly off, and Calvin briefly sees her naked. That is so far out of keeping with the tone of the book that I find it hard to believe it went into the movie; it’s also odd for this bit to be present in a Disney movie.
But the biggest change to the “misses” is that, in the book, they were eclectically dressed, or shabbily dressed:
“My, but I wish there were no wind,” Mrs. Whatsit said plaintively. “It’s so difficult with all these clothes.” She wore her outfit of the night before, rubber boots and all, with the addition of one of Mrs. Buncombe’s sheets which she had draped over her. As she slid off the wall the sheet caught in a low branch and came off. The felt hat slipped over both eyes, and another branch plucked at the pink stole. “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “I shall never learn to manage.”
They weren’t flamboyantly dressed. They weren’t elaborately made up. In the movie, not only are they exotically costumed and made up, but their costumes and makeup change from scene to scene. In fact, their costumes and makeups are so aggressively “active” in the movie that they force themselves on you; you can’t get used to them in the first few scenes and then focus on the characters.
It’s distracting. Every time Oprah Winfrey (Mrs. Which) shows up, I spent the first minute or two staring at her wildly elaborate, metallic costumes; they look like armor. In one scene she’s wearing what looks like a wire cooling rack for baked goods. The gems on her forehead change. Honestly, these costumes look like they are out of Flash Gordon, except more modest; they don’t expose much skin, and they aren’t form-fitting. They’re still nonsense.
We’re being sold a bill of goods. With all the failures of storytelling I’ve outlined, it’s clear that DuVernay cared more about the costumes than the story and characters. One got lavish attention; the others were brutalized and neglected.
Oprah Über Alles
I’m not opposed to the idea that Winfrey, Kaling, and Witherspoon would appear in a movie, and have elaborate costumes and makeup. But the magic of the book, to me, is about the shocking mixing of the extraordinary science-fictional elements right into the mundane elements of Meg’s life; it’s about the universe breaking through into a frustrated girl’s life not just to rescue her, but to recruit her to a higher calling.
The witches are interesting in the book in part because they don’t seem supernatural, until they are revealed to be beings of enormous power. Making the witches exotically beautiful and elaborately coiffed and dressed from the get-go discards the idea that Meg has to learn to understand that they are not just weirdos, but beings “through whom God extends his Grace.” They are unpreposessing in the book. They are “The Women Men Don’t See”, as the short story by James Tiptree Junior (Alice Sheldon) describes them; in that story, Ruth says:
What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.
Remember Cathy Smith’s lines I quoted above:
The inclusion of witches in A Wrinkle in Time is another aspect of the novel that arouses suspicion in the eyes of some readers. The witches have been compared to New Age spirit guides. But clearly the witches are images of angels.
Well, guess what. In the movie adaptation, the witches are “New Age spirit guides.” In this way, the movie embodies one of the strongest criticisms evangelicals made about the book. It’s embraced the untrue thing that Cathy Smith’s school banned the book for, and made them true. That’s what I mean when I say that this adaptation slanders the book.
When the witches show up and they are 40 feet tall, exotically costumed and made up, there’s nowhere to go. There’s not much to gradually reveal. It’s a different kind of story; it’s a garish, showy story from the first scene with the “misses.” And given the way their appearance is constantly changing, it’s a distraction. With the Christian elements deleted, the “witches” are not revealed to be serving a higher power. Sure, they’re fighting a war on the side of good, but should that require so much glamour?
No, the “witches” are actually supposed to represent a tween girl’s vision of adult beauty and power. We’re looking at a fantasy look that, not coincidentally, many stores at her local shopping mall would be happy to help Meg achieve. The witches have gone from being secret angels to overt New Age superheroes.
With these changes, and others, the movie becomes a story almost entirely about the self-esteem and empowerment of Meg, using tropes of the self-help movement that are not in keeping with the language of the book.
There’s even a bizarre moment in which Charles Wallace, flying on lettuce-leaf Mrs. Whatsit’s back, runs his hands along giant Oprah’s face, feeling her flawlessly smooth skin. It’s an act of worship. Remember one of the other passages from Cathy Smith I quoted above?
On the planet Uriel Calvin attempts to bow down and worship Mrs. Whatsit as she transforms her physical appearance. She warns, “Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.”
With no God in the picture, and the “witches” looking like they are ready for a fashion shoot, there’s no reason in the movie why the kids shouldn’t worship them, especially Oprah. They don’t discourage this view.
Honestly, I can’t tell the real from the parody anymore.
With Liberty and Neoliberalism for All!
I want to be clear: I think the changes made in adapting A Wrinkle in Time are changes made as part of a neoliberal agenda: to break down families, and get kids to believe in the culture of individualism, success, and personal empowerment over all traditional solidarity, family and religious values. And the feminist values embodied in the movie are the values of a feminism entirely corrupted and co-opted by neoliberal capitalism.
In her essay “Arguing With My Father About Hillary Clinton’s Ruthlessness,” Catherine Liu writes:
…Hillary Clinton’s platform has expropriated the political power of feminism to promote her presidential candidacy as the realization of more than a century of political struggle for women’s rights. What does Hillary Clinton’s political progress tell us about contemporary politics in the United States? We cannot understand her presidential race and possible presidency without understanding how she and her husband have been able to consolidate a powerful strain of neoliberal ideology. They have successfully reframed the political project of the Democratic Party as a series of highly rationalized, new media- and new technology-friendly protocols of “personal responsibility,” self-improvement, accountability and assessment regimes, and, failing those, punishment.
Everything about the changes made to A Wrinkle in Time, adapting it to film, serve to make it slide neatly into the neoliberal value system. Believe in yourself; invest in yourself. Get a degree in a STEM field. Be empowered. Lean in. God isn’t necessary. We worship the market, and sometimes Oprah (it’s a bit vague, but whatever, as long as “the spirit in me honors the spirit in you.”)
We’ve got a black woman directing a hundred-million dollar movie! We’ve got a young woman of color in a leading role! This is wonderful! We’ve got a rainbow of women as the “misses!” It’s so exciting! Young black women will see themselves represented on screen in a positive way!
Yes.
And also, no.
I believe, I think, in everything the director Ava DuVernay claims to be trying to do in this movie.
But what she’s actually done, I don’t like.
Catherine Liu again:
Clinton represents a powerful political brand: She can lay claim to an aura of progressiveness that masks the reactionary attitudes that she and her wing of the Democratic Party hold. Her candidacy promulgates the fiction that America is always getting more progressive: We just had a black president and now we are getting a woman. A comforting story, but such stories not only mask the reality of neoliberalism, they also help to sustain it.
And this movie portrays a young black woman finding her place in the world, but it’s a world without solidarity, without family, without a coherent story to it, and even without God.
Liu one more time:
To consolidate her political position, Clinton never hesitates to call upon her record of anti-racism to cement her progressive credentials… “multiculturalism” and “diversity” were cosmetic concepts, strategically promoted by liberal institutions.
DuVernay’s made a movie from the belly of the capitalist beast—Disney. It’s “diverse.” It’s “anti-racist.” It’s also anti-Christian, anti-male, neoliberal propaganda. It takes almost everything interesting from the beloved book it is based on, and muddles, misunderstands, dilutes, deletes, or destroys it. It’s not just bad; it’s misguided and misbegotten in nearly every possible way, with the exception of that positive representation, and some excellent acting on the part of Storm Reid and Chris Pine—which I appreciated, but it can’t save the movie.
I guess this is what will have to pass as a victory for representation in film.
It’s frustrating to review this movie, because parts of it work on an emotional level—on some levels, and in some scenes. Many people who saw it have found themselves tearing up at the tear-jerking scenes between Meg and her father. I did as well. But the strange failures in storytelling, undercut it at every turn.
I think this makes it interesting to talk about because it makes me want to understand what went wrong. So I didn’t feel that watching it was a complete waste of time, but some people might. I’m an older white male. The movie may work reasonably well with the target demographic. Our daughter Veronica is 13 years old and bi-racial. She enjoyed it, but she said she felt like there were scenes missing, and that important stuff must have been cut out.
There’s evidence that the movie’s creators knew they had a mess on their hands, and so felt the need to prepare the audience. So the movie actually opens with the director introducing herself and showing some “making of” footage with group shots of all the production crew, as if to say—hey, these are some of the wonderful people who worked so very hard for you to make this movie. You wouldn’t want to hurt them, now would you?
I’m reminded of the people referring to Hillary Clinton as the “popular vote president.” But I’m afraid it just doesn’t work that way.
There will probably be a Director’s Cut, and commentary tracks, and deleted scenes, and I’m really quite curious about those, and what they might reveal about how this movie came to be the way it is.
Ypsilanti, Michigan
March 16, 2018
