'A Wrinkle In Time' Is A Film That Has No Faith In Its Audience

A WRINKLE IN TIME

Watching A Wrinkle In Time feels a little bit like watching Teletubbies: sure, you’re told it’s been made for kids, but the people who’re really going to get deep into it are those stoned outta their gourd. There’s times when watching A Wrinkle In Time feels a lot like watching Teletubbies, too: when its interstellar journey touches down on a distant planet of lurid landscape: endless rolling meadows whose green glows luminous like a tube-TV screen, skies the eyesore blue of over-enthusiastic postcards or colour-gradings.

Watching brightly-coloured figures cavort about this iridescent milieu, you could concern yourself with trying to parse the hows and whys of its YA-Interstellar dimension-hopping —once again, the secret time-travellin’ ingredient is love!— or you could just sit back, inhale deeply, and take a wacky, wonky trip involving a Godzilla-sized Oprah festooned with bedazzled eyebrows, children flying on the back of a dragon shaped like a stingray and made of cabbage leaves, after-school-special-worthy generic high-school bullying, talking flowers that can also fly around for some reason, the first new Sade song in seven years, and time-travel tesseracts that look like psychedelic screen-savers.

Just in case critics couldn’t comprehend that this was made for kids, the local press screening began with an unprecedented pre-film video message in which director Ava DuVernay pops up just-to-let-you-know that she made the film for “kids 8-12 years old”. Though A Wrinkle In Time sure marks a change for DuVernay —whose last two films, Selma and 13th, were loaded studies of race in America that entered the awards-season conversation— this foregrounding of the intended audience, in advance, felt somewhere between unnecessary and standover; a thinly-veiled attempt to curry critical clemency equal parts plea and demand.

The “remember, it’s for kids!” refrain almost feels like an admission of failure. No one need tell you that Toy Story, say, is for kids, but no one would demand it be judged on some sliding, kinda-condescending scale, either. This suggests a greater insecurity re: A Wrinkle In Time, a $100mil blockbuster that’s received a tepid response both critically and commercially; meaning that, for all its success in on-screen representation, it still has the taint of movie-biz failure.

The failure or success of the film, as entertainment to consume whilst chewing popcorn, may just vary depending on how high you are. Based on a Christian-themed fantasy-book classic by Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time is rote inspirationalism told in strange-trip imagery. Its main narrative is a grand cosmic journey of self-acceptance, standard coming-of-age theme given all the greeting-card subtlety of a Disney movie (PS: it, um, is a Disney movie).

Storm Reid plays a 13-year-old who’s picked on for her thick glasses, frizzy hair, and the fact that her dad —Chris Pine, hot scientist— disappeared six years ago after claiming he could travel to distant galaxies via his mind. Reid lives with her mum —Gugu Mbatha-Raw, hot scientist— and brother Deric McCabe; baby bro a little kid of big words who, later, will become the latest entrant in cinema’s ongoing terrifying-child-speaks-cruel-truths sweepstakes. Levi Miller plays Reid’s dream-boy love-interest, a handsome cat who cares not about high-school’s regimented social pecking-order and casually decides to tag along on a journey through time and space.

In search of disappeared dad, the three kids will be led on a merry interplanetary lark by three celebrities: Oprah, essentially playing herself as immortal interdimensional being in Ziggy Stardust wardrobe; Mindy Kaling, who in a v. gimmicky device speaks only in inspirational quotations; and Reese Witherspoon, who brings her anxious passive-aggressive giddiness to a part filled with elaborate plaits, backhanded compliments, and wide-eyed mugging. All feel like they’ve just stepped off a Broadway stage, playing things big and bright and loud for the peeps in the cheap seats.

On this grand Neverending Story there’s CGI-fantasia wonderlands, rides on cabbage-dragons, Zach Galifianakis as quasi-yogi with greying beard, Michael Peña as moustachioed marionette out to do dastardly things, a hellish vision of satirical suburban conformity, and an all-purpose evil-spirit called It (non-clown version) that’s out to roll dark clouds across the entire multi-verse, or something. Eventually, Pine is found in a far-flung cosmos crunching complex equations in the set from Drake’s Hotline Bling video, and evil —in the form of a small boy!— is conquered once and for all. By the power of love!

Love is not just the thing that powers time-travel and beats back the darkness, but the moral of the story. Loving other people is great, but more important, 8 to 12-year-old kids, is to love yourself. This is the message hammered home, time and again, by A Wrinkle In Time, in such overbearing, forceful fashion that it suggests a film that has no faith in its audience to extract a theme, be they child or adult.

THE ENDLESS

The Endless also seeks to be a stoner-philosophising time-twisting meta-dimensional adventure, just at about one-thousandth of the cost. It finds filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead heading out into the Californian desert, depicting a creepy commune that seems to exist in a bubble, inured from the outside world, those inside never leaving, but never aging. A cult set-up is usually pretty can’t-miss, but, sadly, soon the flick just becomes a riff on the duo’s 2012 debut Resolution, a meta horror-movie in which an unseen monster manipulates time-loops in remote locations for its own sadistic pleasure; characters and situations from the first film revisited, here, openly. This makes this flick less a companion piece, more a continuation. It, really, feels like Ep. 2 in a new high-concept television series, but The Endless lacks the gloss, smarts, score, and, acting chops of current peak-TV alt-reality chin-scratchers (treat anyone comparing this to The OA with due suspicion and dismissal).

This starts with Benson and Moorhead, who also star as the main bros in the film, in most unmemorable performances. You’d think that, writing characters that they themselves would play, they’d have given themselves better roles; instead, every character herein is flat, dull, archetypical, generic. It’s also one of those films set in a cult in which five cult members get all the dialogue, whilst everyone else sits politely in the background as mute extras; such stock convention actively working against a film supposedly big on ambition.

In Spring, the film they made in between Resolution and The Endless, Benson and Moorhead staged a kind of Before-Sunrise-if-the-girl-was-a-centuries-old-shapeshifting-monster romance whose two-hander set-up demanded characters of greater depth and complexity. Here, with the time-loops premise established in advance, the characters don’t need to seem human; their fate, essentially, to be tormented lab-rats. This means that, ultimately, The Endless is an inspired idea let down by uninspired writing.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

Here’s when you know your barbs have hit their mark: The Death Of Stalin, the latest work for political satirist Armando Iannucci, has been banned in Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan. It’s as good a recommendation as any. Iannucci’s second feature, following 2009’s In The Loop, marks the satirist’s return to cinema after years helming TV’s Veep. It’s familiar Iannucci: hilarity found in both backroom politicking and gleeful profanity, with thematic resonance coming from its depictions of the machinations of institutions of power, and the kind of people drawn to them. Here, there’s the added cultural resonance of making a comedy out of the death of one of history’s greatest monsters; The Death Of Stalin an artistic evocation of Marx’s most famous homily: that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Here, there’s tragedy and farce in spades. It’s 1953, and Stalin —a feared despot who’ll dispatch a man to death for looking at him sideways— collapses in his chambers. His vast cast of Central Committeee underlings (Simon Russell Beale, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin, Jason Isaacs, etc) gather in hastily-assembled emergency-meeting, and instantly begin a tug-of-war over the still-warm body: jockeying for power, position, status; airing grievances, making alliances, staging double-crosses.

It’s political opportunism painted in grotesque shades of feeding frenzy, with comedy wrung from how these squabbling lackeys race to be front-row at the funeral, first in the procession, most tender comforters of the General’s grieving daughter, Andrea Riseborough. Iannucci plays plenty loose with history, but anyone expecting historical accuracy is coming to the wrong film. Instead, The Death Of Stalin will play well to those who know what they’re getting into: defiant rebukes of the horrors of petty politicking played for laughs, laced with liberal usage of the word ‘cunt’.