Review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Gives a Child of the Universe Powerful Friends

What I remember most about “A Wrinkle in Time” is my second-grade teacher crying over the final pages during read-aloud time, along with nearly everyone else. I suspect some variant of this experience is common among readers who grew up any time since 1962, when Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved science-fiction coming-of-age novel was first published.

The movie adaptation, directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, has been a long time coming, and it arrives in theaters buoyed by and burdened with expectations. It is the first $100 million movie directed by an African-American woman, and the diversity of its cast is both a welcome innovation and the declaration of a new norm. This is how movies should look from now on, which is to say how they should have looked all along. Fans of the book and admirers of DuVernay’s work — I include myself in both groups — can breathe a sigh of relief, and some may also find that their breath has been taken away.

Mine was, once or twice, though I would describe the overall experience as satisfaction rather than awe. “A Wrinkle in Time,” faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s preferred ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups. The best way to appreciate what she has done is in the company of a curious and eager 10-year-old (as I was fortunate enough to do). Or, if you’re really lucky, to locate that innocent, skeptical, openhearted version of yourself.

The story comes with a heroine who makes such identification easy. Meg Murry is a smart, hurt and very real-seeming middle school student played with wonderful solemnity by Storm Reid. Meg’s father (Chris Pine), a brilliant and ambitious scientist, has disappeared, leaving behind Meg; her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe); and their mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is also a brilliant and ambitious scientist.

The parental partnership, an intellectual romance and a romance between intellectuals, is conveyed with graceful efficiency in the first part of the movie, which also sketches Meg’s predicament. As she grieves for her father and wonders where he went, she also contends with the usual early adolescent afflictions and anxieties. Her grades are slumping, her classmates tease her, and neither the principal (André Holland) nor her mother seem to understand what she is going through.

The frustrations and injustices of youth can feel as vast as the cosmos. In Meg’s case, they literally are. Her father didn’t just run off, he “tessered,” slipping into a distant part of the universe to prove a hypothesis about space, time and consciousness that he and his wife had developed together. Now he is lost, and everything is threatened by a malevolent force known as the IT (not to be confused with the malevolent force in the movie “It”), which lives on a planet called Camazotz.

Tesser, by the way is the verb form of “tesseract,” a phenomenon rendered more poetically by the movie’s title. That and a good deal more is explained by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, three astrophysical principles who take the earthly forms of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and a literally bigger-than-life Oprah Winfrey. Mrs. Whatsit is a flame-haired, slightly scatterbrained chatterbox. Mrs. Who is an edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations come to life, offering wisdom gleaned from the likes of Rumi, Shakespeare and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Mrs. Which offers her own brand of affirmation, guidance and tough love, encouraging Meg to find and become her best self and to be a warrior for good against the forces of darkness. In other words: Oprah Winfrey. With glittering makeup and shimmering armor.

The special effects are pretty wild, though not always as overpowering as the gasps and exclamations of the characters might indicate. The flying flowers on the planet Uriel are sublime, the spectacle of Witherspoon transformed into an airborne cabbage less so. In any case, Meg and Charles Wallace, accompanied by a sweet boy named Calvin (Levi Miller), who has a crush on Meg, tesser off in search of their dad, finding picturesque planets and Zach Galifianakis as a grumpy guru called the Happy Medium. It’s fairly mellow fun until the Mrses take their leave and the youngsters must face the terrors of Camazotz and the IT on their own.

At this point, the images become sharper, scarier and more austere, and the emotions more intense. The warmth that is DuVernay’s calling card encounters a Kubrickian chill as the power of the IT starts to mess around with Meg’s mind and Charles Wallace’s personality. The worst part of the adventure is the best part of the movie, and it’s over a little too soon.

Like Mrs. Which and her colleagues, “A Wrinkle in Time” is demonstratively generous, encouraging and large-spirited. Though it is full of bright colors and passages of visual dazzle, it trusts words more than images, spelling out messages about love, courage and self-acceptance with the conscientious care of a teacher reading aloud to a class. (It also makes canny use of music, both Ramin Djawadi’s score and songs from of-the-moment pop and hip-hop artists.) Nobody will miss the lessons of the movie, and they are fine and timely lessons. Those who take them most to heart will find their way back to Madeleine L’Engle.

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'A Wrinkle in Time'

Rated PG. Evil in the universe. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes