Things pick up with the next entity, Mindy Kaling’s dreamy “Mrs. Whatsit” - is played by Reese Witherspoon, whose frilly gown is meant to look as if the character had invaded a high-school theater department’s costume room, but whose acting is less intentionally high-schoolish. They still have a trace of that theme-park-Disney wooziness, along with a score by Game of Throne’s Ramin Djawadi that’s off in the ether before the first astral being lands. The early scenes of A Wrinkle in Time - before we’re introduced to the “tesseract” and the spatial-temporal bounding begins - are relatively grounded, but only compared to what follows. Meg’s lone allies are her adopted 5-year-old brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), a cryptic genius of uncertain origin, and a handsome young fella named Calvin (Levi Miller), whose crush on Meg gives him something to play besides bland geniality. ![]() Related Storiesĭirectors Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler Want to Transform WorldsĪdding insult to injury are the oddly empathy-deficient peers who have made Meg a pariah and the dismally insensitive school administrators who think it’s about time she accepted that her dad isn’t coming back and gone about upping her GPA. Her vaultingly ambitious scientist father (Chris Pine with a beard that crawls nearly into his blue eyes) has disappeared, leaving her only slightly less vaultingly ambitious scientist mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) pissed off and strangely uncommunicative. ![]() It’s not L’Engle’s world, but it’s one the author would have been thrilled by, at least at the outset: a jump through the eponymous time wrinkle from suburban Connecticut to a mixed-race family in an America in which the “IT” - L’Engle’s name for the dark matter that penetrates and dissolves human connections and works to shatter the young heroine’s self-possession - is manifest in almost every aspect of modern life.ĭuVernay has cast the middle-school heroine, Meg Murry, with the intense, down-to-earth 14-year-old actress Storm Reid, whose Meg has every reason to be stormy. My elation on hearing that Ava DuVernay would direct Madeleine L’Engle’s classic 1962 time-and-space-traveling fantasy A Wrinkle in Time, was strong enough to carry me through the film’s first, wobbly 15 minutes - but not a lot further.
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