I never hope for a movie to be a box office failure, but let’s just say I take a certain perverse sense of satisfaction when poor efforts garner similar results. “A Wrinkle in Time,” based on the children’s novel by Madeleine L'Engle, wasn’t exactly a financial disaster, earning $129 million worldwide.
But it was a big, expensive movie, the first time an African-American female director (Ava DuVernay) was entrusted with a nine-figure budget. And “Wrinkle” did not do “Black Panther” numbers.
Dollars and sense aside, the movie is just a discombobulated mess. Unless you’ve read the book, you’ll spend much of your time trying to puzzle out who the characters are and where the sci-fi/fantasy story is going.
Storm Reid plays Meg Murray, a forlorn girl of about 12 who is pining for her long-lost dad, a scientist who disappeared several years ago. She finds herself spirited away on a journey through the cosmos, with three mystical beings called the Missuses guiding the way.
Chief among them is Miss Which, a queenly sort played by Oprah Winfrey. Like her sisters (Mindy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon), they look like bedazzled women who wear lavish wedding dresses for every occasion.
Tagging along with Meg are her chirpy 6-year-old brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and Calvin (Levi Miller), a handsome lad her own age who’s very supportive and nonthreatening. The cast also includes Chris Pine as the dad; Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the mom; Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium, a kooky advice-giving sort; and Michael Peña as Red, a crimson fellow who offers some assistance.
It’s a beautiful, colorful film -- imagine Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in space, with fantastical creatures and warp-holes. But eventually we become listless at the uninspired storytelling.
Video extras are pretty generous. They include an expansive making-of documentary; four deleted scenes with commentary; a feature-length audio commentary track with DuVernay and a half-dozen of her key crew members; blooper reel; and two music videos.
I never read the popular children's novel by Madeleine L'Engle (or even knew it existed, for that matter). But any movie should be able to stand on its own from its source material, especially one aimed at a YA audience of 9- to 13-year-olds. Instead, we get a big-budget movie that requires a written program and screen subtitles just to approach basic comprehensibility.
Directed by Ava DuVernay ("Selma") from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, "A Wrinkle in Time" is the story of a brave, precocious girl who goes on spiritual and inter-dimensional trip across the universe in search of her long-lost father, a dreamer and voyager, who abandoned the family out of a sense of higher purpose.
(If that sounds like it has a more than passing resemblance to the plot of "Interstellar," that's because it does. One wonders if this movie could exist without that one, or that movie could exist without the book. But that's one for the philosophers and/or copyright lawyers to ponder.)
The film is getting most of its attention for the starring role of Oprah Winfrey as the chief of "the Missuses," odd interstellar beings easily identifiable by their pancake makeup, kooky elaborate costumes and bedazzled faces and hair. As Mrs. Which, Winfrey wears what appears to be a cross between a suit of armor and Cinderella's ballroom gown, jeweled eyebrows and an albino wig of sea foam swirls.
For most of her scenes, Mrs. Which materializes in an outlandishly outsized form, so she's literally towering above the other characters, delivering pronouncements from on high like a beneficent god-queen. I realize that's already how a large chunk of our population views Winfrey, so it will likely not seem out of place to them.
Though, in keeping with the broadcasting titan's self-love ethos, Mrs. Which admonishes one of her lessers that there is 'no such thing as the wrong size' -- which is something you can get away with saying if you are a billionaire who has literally been every size.
Her sisters/followers are Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who always seems a little dazed and is constantly reciting famous quotes -- with attribution! -- and Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who appears to be the novice of the trio, having been assigned to help out Meg Murray (Storm Reid), the story's protagonist.
The Missuses actually disappear about halfway through the movie, leaving the kids in charge. Meg has become moody and angry in the four years since her dad vanished, claiming it's possible to bend space and time with the help of a Tesseract. It's unclear if this is a physical object or a term for using one's mind, since the act of wrinkling the cosmos is also used as a verb "to tesser."
Conjugate that, kiddies!
Her adopted 6-year-old brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), is supposed to be some kind of pint-sized science genius, although with his chirpy voice shouting most of his dialogue at parakeet octaves, I'll have to take the filmmakers' word that what he had to say was smart. He comes along for the trip, for reasons that remain unclear.
Even murkier are the motivations of Calvin (Levi Miller), a dreamy boy who's nice and supportive to everyone. His job is basically to just stand around and tell Meg how great she is. In most movies, Calvin and Meg would end up as a cute teen couple, but despite some moony looks passing back and forth, there's barely even a supportive hug.
Calvin is not so much a character as a Beta Male fantasy of what 12-year-old girls think the perfect boy is supposed to be like, at least until they get to high school and dump him for the football jock or the parking-lot pothead.
Anyway, they visit various fantastical-looking worlds filled with flying flowers and other CGI curiosities, and at one point Whatsit transforms into a flat, furry flying creature that looks like a vegan version of the critter from "The Neverending Story."
There's also some kind of evil force spreading across the universe, known simply as the It, which I thought we had all clearly established was an underground clown that either kills children or makes them have group sex with each other.
Zach Galifianakis turns up as the Happy Medium, who's some kind of lonely guru; Chris Pine is Meg's dad, sporting Hollywood hair that looks short but droops down past the cheekbones when it gets mussed; Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the mom, consigned to just looking smashing and doing nothing; and Michael Peña plays a guy on a beach who seems helpful but really has his mind on one thing, which either makes him the villain or every single teenage boy ever, who wouldn't be caught dead buying a ticket for this movie.
"A Wrinkle in Time" is like a safe acid trip for youngsters, full of color and music and powerful females and guys who know enough to get out of the way of the ladies.
“The Ottoman Lieutenant” has the look and feel of a literary adaptation, something in the Merchant/Ivory tradition of “A Room with a View,” if it was given a more overtly soap opera tone. But it’s an original screenplay by Jeff Stockwell that contains familiar notes from other historical romance/dramas.
The best thing about it is newcomer Hera Hilmar as Lillie, an independent-minded young woman in 1914 Philadelphia. The daughter of a well-to-do family, she’s an old maid of 23 who’s chosen to work as a nurse rather than get married and push out a passel of kids. Then she is introduced to a dashing doctor, Jude (Josh Hartnett), who helps run a missionary hospital on the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), who is on a fundraising tour in the States.
Using her inheritance and over the objections of tut-tutting parents, Lillie resolves to send a truck that belonged to her late brother along with a shipment of medical supplies. Of course, she needs to go along herself to ensure its safe delivery … as well as satisfy her craving for adventure in an exotic land that is on the cusp of war.
Hilmar has a wide, strong face and an obstinate chin, and projects the aura of a proto-feminist whose worst possible outcome in life is doing exactly what is expected of her. She’s been in a few small films and TV shows, but has a bunch of films in various states of production, which I’ll be looking forward to.
Director Joseph Ruben has an eclectic resume that includes everything from sci-fi thrillers like “Dreamscape” to dumb action films (“Money Train”) and psychological thrillers (“Sleeping with the Enemy”). He lets his camera roam over the Turkish landscape, which segues from harsh deserts and mountains to sweeping fields and lake islands. (Most of the indoor stuff was shot in Czechoslovakia.)
The title concerns Ismail, a stalwart Ottoman officer played by Michiel Huisman, a Dutch actor best known for playing the smirking mercenary Daario on “Game of Thrones.” Ismail comes from a long line of military heroes and feels the need to live up to those expectations, while having more modernistic sentiments about things like a Muslim man dallying with a Christian American woman.
He helps escort Lillie through the desert on the way to the mission, where they encounter Christian bandits (Affif Ben Badra plays their leader) in a sequence that has a very Lawrence of Arabia Lite feel to it. They exchange glances and, later, more intimate things.
Of course, Dr. Jude isn’t terribly thrilled about their romance, having designs upon Lillie for himself. Hartnett plays the doctor as a basically decent guy who projects himself as a progressive Christian, but has some very old-fashioned ideas about gender, religion and nationality.
Ben Kingsley rounds out the cast as Dr. Garrett Woodruff, the founder of the mission who is wallowing in misery because of a personal tragedy, about which we’ll soon learn more (but can surely guess). He takes out his anger on this around him, and initially Lillie becomes a main target.
Meanwhile, World War I is revving up and the Russians could be arriving any day now. More wounded show up in the hospital, and there’s deadly tension between the local Christians and Muslims. It’s choose-up-sides time, including for Lillie and her two beaus.
(I should mention the film has an “R” rating for “war violence” from the MPAA, but barely should have merited a PG-13. You can literally see worse stuff on broadcast television.)
I liked a lot of things about “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” especially Hera Hilmar, without being quite swept up in the experience as a whole. It’s a very old-fashioned story without a lot of surprises. You can almost picture the cheap romance novel version: “She was caught between two worlds – and two lovers!”
