Film review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

Good message and strong cast help pass the ‘Time’|

Commenting on her film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” director Ava Duvernay showed she has the right perspective on the large budget for the film: “Disney will be fine.” And, thanks to her strong and diverse cast, she still delivers a pleasing movie with all the right messages for kids.

Duvernay’s biggest gift might be her ability to pick actors, beginning with the protagonist Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a middle schooler with the usual angst but ramped up since her experimental scientist father Dr. Alex Murry (Chris Pine) disappeared. Thanks to her mother, another doctor named Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Meg is still bent on a brilliant life. Though she has problems with the mean girls at school, Meg’s world is filled with positive role models: Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Nelson Mandela - the list goes on.

As any budding leader would, Meg wants to find her dad, who she suspects has slipped through one of those creases in the space-time continuum (the physics of how one travels through a wrinkle are only lightly explained). But, before you step into a portal that could shoot you across the universe, you need to pick a good crew.

Meg has her little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe and his off-the-charts cuteness factor), a boy who speaks more eloquently than any elementary schooler you’re likely to meet, and Calvin (Levi Miller) a neighborhood boy who harbors an interest in hard science and a major crush on Meg.

To get Alex back requires the assistance of three ancient interstellar travelers for whom sparkly eyeliner is the sign of their great powers. We meet first Mrs. Whatsit (a gingery Reese Witherspoon) who shows them their first wrinkle and then transforms from a cloud-like goddess to a lettuce leaf/dragon/magic carpet thingee.

She’s accompanied by Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who speaks mostly in quotations, with an emphasis on prophets: Khalil Gibran, Rumi, OutKast. Then there’s Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) who encourages Meg to not stay inward but to turn her personality outward.

Even if she’s not a presidential candidate, you must listen to Winfrey’s authority when she tells you to have hope and to resist.

The film insists that we’re familiar with the verb “to tesser,” as in harnessing the power of a tesseract, a fifth-dimensional cube used for space and time travel that is (regrettably) already known to us from “The Avengers” films.

After one such tessering, the crew meets the Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis goofing around in monk’s robes) who hints that Meg’s dad might be on Camazotz, a planet seething with the evil energy of “it.” The brave kids head there and meet Red (Michael Peña), a tempter in a hand-paint?ed suit that matches the beach he stands on, enticing the kids with sand sandwiches. Darkness descends.

As in “Black Panther,” the locations chosen for “A Wrinkle in Time” toggle between a recognizable city and wide fantasy worlds - Duvernay makes the Baldwin Crenshaw district of Los Angeles look as fascinating as the light-drenched planet Uriel. While Ryan Coogler got new Kendrick Lamar tracks for his film, Duvernay accomplished an even greater coup, getting Sade to cut her first single in 20 years.

Being dragged into a black pit of timeless existential death might be too scary for some young viewers (or 35-year-old film critics) and Meg’s dad, when found, gets asked some harsh questions about abandoning his family on his quixotic quest to “shake hands with the universe.” But you always trust the indomitable Meg will pull through and be one with the cosmos. She seems to know intuitively the truth in the words of another prophet called Stevie Nicks: “Don’t you know that the stars are a part of us?”

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