Family ties are the strength of ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Storm Reid, Deric McCabe, and Levi Miller in “A Wrinkle in Time.”
By Ty Burr Globe staff March 07, 2018
The books we read in childhood — the great ones, anyway — can seem so foundational to our growing senses of self that we reject any attempts to tamper with them. That’s natural and it’s also unfair, and it complicates my response to the new film version of “A Wrinkle in Time” directed by Ava DuVernay (“Selma”), just as it may complicate yours.
It isn’t the diversity of the movie’s announced casting that had me concerned; that’s welcome and, more to the point, it works, reflecting a more inclusive America than the one in which Madeleine L’Engle’s book was published in 1962. Rest assured, in young Storm Reid, “Wrinkle” has the best Meg Murry a L’Engle reader could hope for: ardent, insecure, a big wonderful brain warring with an adolescent’s outsized emotions.
No, every film adaptation of a beloved childhood book has to be a betrayal to some degree because it will never match the production long since staged in our heads. And “A Wrinkle in Time” is a hell of a production, with otherworldly beings, intergalactic leaps, and an allegorical wrestling match between good and evil. For years, people have called the book “unfilmable”; that only means they’d prefer it stay inside their imaginations. (The studio, Walt Disney Pictures, prefers otherwise, obviously.)
So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype. Parts of “A Wrinkle in Time” work while others don’t; luckily, the parts that do involve the core around which L’Engle’s book resonates: love of family, love of being alive, love of our common humanity and the experiences that bind us together. You never once doubt this movie’s commitment to the book’s intense emotional reality — its warmth.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2018/03/07/family-ties-are-strength-wrinkle-time/wM2eiYTvtOgDXg7ssVeuOP/story.html
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P.S. Storm Reid is pronounced Storm Ride (in German).
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