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.
“Selma” was a good but hardly great movie. The fact that it received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture seems more a nod to the weight of the historical subject it tackled -- the civil rights struggle that brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- rather than the actual aesthetic merits of how they depicted it.
I found David Oyelowo alternately mesmerizing and off-putting as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Director Ava DuVernay and her star have talked in interviews about their deliberate effort not to perform an impersonation of King. But the cadence of his speeches is such an important part of his legend -- so when Oyelowo purposefully avoids replicating that timbre, it subtracts from the power of those scenes.
(The filmmakers also weren’t helped by being denied permission to use the actual text of the speeches, so screenwriter Paul Webb had to whip up facsimiles.)
By far the most memorable part of the movie is the depiction of the brutal “Bloody Sunday” encounter between peaceful protestors and Alabama state troopers. Harrowing and vividly emotional, this sequence brings the dry history out of the textbook and into our eyes and hearts.
Other scenes, though, become a flat parade of supporting characters who struggle to erect any kind of identity.
In retrospect, the hurricane of controversy over the film “only” receiving two Academy Award nominations seems ridiculous. (It did win for best song.) The reason it didn’t fare better during the awards season is because it’s just not that great a movie.
Certainly worthy of our time, but not fawning admiration.
The film is being given a sumptuous video release with a host of extra features, though you’ll need to buy the Blu-ray version to get most of them. The DVD only comes with a couple of educational featurettes.
The Blu-ray adds several making-of featurettes, a music video of “Glory,” photo gallery, deleted and extended scenes, and two separate commentary tracks: one by DuVernay and Oyelowo -- I always love it when actors join their directors for these things -- and the other with DuVernay and her cinematographer and editor.
"Selma" has been mislabeled as "the Martin Luther King Jr. movie," which it is not, just as the three months of demonstrations for black voting rights in 1965 Alabama was not merely his doing. (Others had been organizing and protesting for two years before King arrived.)
The drama, directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Paul Webb, is a bit stodgy at times -- characters sometimes feel like they're reciting speeches instead of talking to each other. It also takes a bunch of well-publicized liberties with the historical record, such as depicting President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) as MLK's chief antagonist in opposing the Voting Rights Act, when the two coordinated closely.
(And it was Robert Kennedy who unleashed the FBI to spy on King on his cohorts, not LBJ.)
Still, it depicts several moments possessing great power, such as the recreation of the "Bloody Sunday" event in which state troopers ran down defenseless non-violent protestors marching from Selma to Montgomery. DuVernay brings to life the incredible struggles during the civil rights era, especially the pervasive sense of African-American being marginalized and oppressed.
Some of the quieter moments are the best, such as when a workaday woman (Oprah Winfrey) attempts to register to vote and is given an impossible citizenship test by the court clerk. (After correctly answering how many county judges are in Alabama, 67, she is instructed, "Name them.") The reality of Jim Crow would not begin to fade until hearts and minds were changed, not just laws passed.
I'm a bit ambivalent about the performance of David Oyelowo as King. Impressions are the shallowest portion of capturing a public figure's persona, but MLK's musical cadences during his speeches are so inextricably linked to his iconography that it's distracting when Oyelowo conspicuously avoids them. (Imagine someone playing Winston Churchill without the gravelly growl.)
Undoubtedly, some of this criticism is unfair. King is such a giant in our national heritage, the closest thing we have to a secular saint, that any attempt to depict him is fraught with all sorts of challenges. We bring so much baggage into the theater with us that watching the film becomes an exercise in separating our conception of him with what we see onscreen.
The movie depicts King as a man of great conviction but also one of cold calculation, who knew he was putting others in harm's way -- counting on bloodshed, even, to capture headlines and newscasts. In one somewhat shocking moment, he cheers the presence of a backward hillbilly sheriff, since he can be counted upon to split skulls and generate sympathy.
Webb's screenplay does a poor job of working in the other civil rights giants who organized the Selma protests, including James Bevel (Common) and Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce). They wind up as a vague chorus of hangers-on and also-rans.
Stephan James stands out as John Lewis, then a college student beaten bloody during the march (and now a Congressman), as does Keith Stansfield as Jimmie Lee Jackson, murdered in cold blood by police.
It's rather disappointing that "Selma," directed by an African-American woman, does a rather poor job of representing black women in other than window dressing roles. Winfrey (also a producer) has little more than a cameo, and Lorraine Toussaint is a frequent, vivid screen presence who gets to say astonishing little. (Other than one contrived-sounding speech, she barely has any lines.)
Carmel Ejoga as Coretta Scott King is largely relegated to the home front, clutching and fretting over threats to her husband and children.
"Selma" is the sort of movie that earns respect but not ardor. It tackles a big subject, fleshes it out reasonably well, but labors to find the passion and beating hearts of those brave marchers in Selma.
What could have been a searing portrait of race relations in America seen through the eyes of a longtime White House butler instead becomes something like a cheap "Forrest Gump" knockoff.
"Lee Daniels' The Butler" is loosely based on the life of real White House butler Eugene Allen, who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986. He was a witness to the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century, from school integration to the civil rights upheaval and Vietnam.
Director Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong, who based the movie on a Washington Post article by Wil Haygood, use this as a basis for the completely fictionalized persona of Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whitaker. While it starts out as a strong character portrait, it soon morphs into a hard-to-believe sequence of events in which either Cecil or his son is present, Zelig-like, at every single pivotal moment in the civil rights movement.
(And yes, the official title is "Lee Daniels' The Butler" -- the studio even sent out a stern reminder to that effect. Personally I think including the name of a director or author in the title makes them seem incredibly insecure.)
Even worse was the choice to cast well-known actors as the presidents Cecil served. Most of the time they bear not a whit of physical resemblance to the Oval Office occupant they're supposed to represent, and their attempts to mimic their speech or mannerisms fall short. Thus, Robin Williams' Eisenhower seems pinched and feisty, while John Cusack as Nixon (!!) has an itchy, sad quality.
Liev Schreiber does an amusing through pretty standard LBJ parody, and James Marsden adds a New England warp to his vowels as Kennedy. Alan Rickman's Reagan is probably the best of the lot, capturing the Gipper's unseen warmth. Casting Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan seems like some sort of cruel in-joke, especially when she invites Cecil and his wife to attend a state dinner as their guests just so (it's implied) there will be some diversity in the room.
The main problem with the churning of administrations is none of them hang around long enough to make any substantial impression, so these appearances end up falling just north of cameos. One part where Cecil attends to Jackie Kennedy after the assassination, her clothes still stained with JFK's blood, is a cheap and false moment.
The movie is at its best when it peers at the relationship between Cecil, his often-troublesome marriage to his boozy wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), his children and his co-workers. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the prankster head butler, and Lenny Kravitz is the more sedate wingman. The scenes where the White House staff hang out in the kitchen and back areas are lively and insightful, contributing to an Upstars/Downstairs vibe.
I enjoyed the section where Cecil talks about the two faces of the black house servant. You wear one face that is your own at home and among friends, but when white folks are around you must be non-threatening, indeed a non-entity -- "the room should feel empty when you are in it," Cecil learns.
He even manages to land his White House gig through strident obsequiousness. When a white manager suggests him to the black head butler, the latter takes affront -- and Cecil sides with him, saying he's right to want to hand-pick his own staff. Impressed with the way Cecil can disappear inside himself, he hires him on the spot, commenting that he'll "be a good house n*gger."
The part where Cecil tangles with his oldest son Louis (David Oyelowo) over his evolution into a civil rights activist grows increasingly far-fetched. Louis manages to be at the forefront of virtually every iconic scene from the equal rights movement -- getting beat up at a diner sit-in, having police dogs and firehouses trained on him, being nearly burned alive on a torched Freedom Rider bus, even seguing into the nascent Black Panther movement.
Curiously, the moment when the civil rights era arrives on Cecil's doorstep, the 1963 march on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, is not represented.
I think this ambitious film would have been better off as a rumination on the different paths African-Americans have taken toward equality and respect -- the way of the harsh revolutionary vs. the quiet insider. Instead, its story and emotions wander all over the map of the black experience, never finding a home.
