A Wrinkle in Time

I just got done watching Disney’s TV movie of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I would have thought was basically unfilmable.

Indeed, it barely was. The scenes with Mrs. Whatsit as a centaur were barely watchable, the CGI was so bad; and the entire potrayal of all the “good” planets (as opposed to Camazotz) felt very stagey, reminiscent somehow of The Wizard of Oz movie rather than the ideal, more realistic portrayal.

And Meg Murry should have frizzy uncontrollable red hair.

That said, the power of the story pulled you through, and the cast was quite good in their roles, including the girl playing Meg. The wardrobe for Mrs. Who was exactly perfect. The portrayal of the planet of Camazotz was actually very effective. Somehow, in the latter half of the movie, the production started feeling like one of those slightly disjoint, lower-budget-than-they-should-be British productions, with the vibe of a Brazil or a Neverwhere. Movies where they have limited special effects budget, so they make do, aiming the camera slightly off-kilter, relying on lighting and a sort of surrealist tone. For Camazotz, this worked very well. (And Kyle Secor is rapidly carving out a niche portraying “the ordinary guy who is evil.”)

The book, of course, is near and dear to my heart. I read L’Engle at the same time that I first discovered Narnia, and back when I was inhaling Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Xanth, and The Bourne Identity (yes, I know, “one of these things is not like the other” — I was an… unusual… reader when I was a child; this latter book had the distinction of being confiscated from me while I was in pre-school. The teachers didn’t want to believe I had put it in my backpack because I was halfway through reading it). I would check them out of the public library in Greenfield, MA, and then would pester my mother into buying them for me anyway.

I never got into the other L’Engle books back then — whereas for Kristen, her entry was the Vicky Austin books, which meant that when I was in college, I had the pleasure of rediscovering a writer and finding a treasure trove of “new” books to read. A few almost equaled that crazy sense of wide-open possibility that accompanied the wry and yet totally supernatural flavor of the adventures of Meg and Charles Wallace. (We won’t go into the film adaptation Disney did of those books, starring that girl from The O.C.).

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Disney movie is that it preserves the sanctity of the reading experience. Many read L’Engle as a religious writer these days, which is I suppose very very broadly correct; it’s perhaps better to call her a mystical, spiritual writer. A quick peruse of the deleted scenes reveals that the filmmakers tacked on a lengthy, very Disney-like introductory sequence explaining the tesseract and even how the government was involved; they also filmed scenes with lines quoting Star Trek, Harry Potter, and The Matrix. All of these scenes were removed, and the film is the better for it, though it then demands acceptance on its own terms. But as L’Engle says in the rather good interview included in the extras, “sometimes there are questions we shouldn’t have answers to.”

I have no idea how the film will “read” to someone who hasn’t read the books . But if you haven’t read the books, you aren’t literate in the fantasy genre, in my opinion; they are as central to the canon of young adult fantasy literature as Earthsea, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain. I’m guessing that the reviews of the film were middling. But that’s not what mattered to me. What mattered is that the movie didn’t stomp all over a cherished book.

My daughter’s reaction? At first — “this doesn’t make sense to me,” quickly followed by being mesmerized. Who knows, I may actually get her to read the books now.