I saw it with my first grader this weekend. She enjoyed the sparkly, I think, and danced to the end-credit music. I basically found what I was expecting to find: one of those 60s-70s-80s “children’s fantasy” stories in which a child is ripped away from home to a weird, scary world that doesn’t follow the established rules of logic, and left alone to find her way home. This kind of thing has always stressed me the heck out. I didn’t like Neverending Story and I didn’t particularly like this.
As far as skill of directing, it flowed about as well as the first Harry Potter movie.
I have read commentary related to this movie and the new BBC remake of the first His Dark Materials book. For the HDM book, they discuss the movie which failed 10 years ago and how it attempted to gloss over the aggressively anti-Christian message in the trilogy, which led to a movie who’s central narrative was compromised. This was stated in the context of the BBC miniseries having to rectify that if it is to succeed.
In discussing Wrinkle, the writer pointed out that it has some underlying, strong, pro-Christian messaging that was minimized in the other direction vs. HDM minimizing anti-C messaging.
I haven’t read the book or seen the movie. But for those that love the book and/or seen the movie: Is this a fair read? Does the Wrinkle book embrace and movie side-step Christian messaging in a way that leaves the movie fuzzier than it needed to be?
(fwiw, I am NOT commenting on pro- or anti-Christian messaging; I am commenting on a movie team deciding to dilute a loved-book’s messaging to seek broader appeal, but missing something as a result).
It def got rid of the christian messaging, but there wasn’t actually a whole lot of christian … proselytizing? (for lack of a better term) in the book, just lots of christian platitudes and bible quotations and verses from hymns that were used to illustrate points and make the book’s central idea of a smart (can be read as atheist) scientist girl from a scientist family being the one to rescue her dad go down a bit easier in the early 60s. That’s probably also part of the reason the ‘power of love’ wins the day instead of diff eq and higher maths.
Anyway, the bible verses and hymns got swapped out for a more diverse (and more modern, and more secular) set of quotations.
But since the original theme of the book is ‘the forces of light are gentle ‘warriors’ of hope and kindness and love standing against the oppressive and megalomaniac force of darkness,’ it’s not like there was much fuzzier the messaging could get.
i’m saying the family is made of two scientist parents and a whole set of ‘exceptional’ kids, and there is no time when anyone in the family unit mentions praying or going to church or god. So that’s a hurdle for children’s publishing in the 60s in america already.
To have the main character then ALSO be a brilliant mathematician GIRL with two subsidiary male ‘helpers’ and a father who doesn’t save the day only makes it worse. So yes, I think the bible verses and christian trappings are very much intended to sweeten the pill.
It’s been an age since I read any of the books (and I recall deeply disliking the one with the twins met Enoch and the “smell the slut” line was pretty much the end of me reading the books …really hoping I’m not getting confused with another book series, there). I do seem to recall something where Buddha and Jesus and various others were all lumped together as some sort of exceptional people?
Calvin reads a bedtime story from the Bible to Charles Wallace: “Genesis. His choice.” The fact that a 5-year-old (albeit an exceptional one) chooses the Bible for his bedtime story indicates a family for which religious texts are familiar. Charles Wallace also immediately recognizes another biblical quotation and names Jesus as one of the fighters against darkness. There are numerous other indications in this book and its sequels that the Murry family is Christian.
Madeleine L’Engle was a devout Christian so it’s no surprise that Christian imagery and ideas are sprinkled liberally throughout her work. I find her less heavy-handed than C.S. Lewis (though I must admit the religious references in the Chronicles of Narnia sailed over my head when I was a child, at least until the final book).
I haven’t seen the movie yet but I’m looking forward to it.
I saw the movie yesterday and was underwhelmed. (If I read the book, it was over thirty five years ago and I don’t remember much of it. My wife listened to them in audiobook recently.)
I’m just going to talk about my weird things with the movie but I do agree with several points already made here on the thread.
I get that Charles Wallace went by that, rather than a shorter version, but it didn’t work for me. Probably does when you read it but when you say it aloud, it’s a rough name to say. I think, and I’m not a linguist, it’s because the transition from the s to the w isn’t smooth for the mouth. Compare that to Anne Marie, which flows nicely from one name to the next. (My wife said it was due to those being names of close friends of the author, so at least there was a reason.)
The Mrs didn’t seem to act but be themselves. Oprah seemed to be Oprah. It took away from those characters for me because I wasn’t seeing the characters but the actors.
I also don’t like adventures where they are taken compared to it being a choice.
Having said those, I don’t mind that I saw the movie in the theater. The visuals are gorgeous on the big screen. The Mrs first appearance works great on that, same for several of the planets they visit.
Yes. She was quite a faithful Episcopalian and the themes of God using flawed humans to fight against the forces of evil and darkness is a major part of the book (and other aspects of paradox as related to faith). Though I think that these days a lot of people kind of look at Christianity as fundamentalism or Catholicism, and ignore liberal mainstream Protestantism and therefore those themes don’t strike as Christian as much.
I never read Wrinkle as a kid but I did a few months ago to prep for the movie, which I did see the other day. I didn’t find either too Jesus-y, ESPECIALLY compared to Narnia, which I’m just about finished re-reading.
I’ve read a few times the Wrinkle book is often a banned book. Can anyone explain to me why? I only read the first and will get to the others after I finish Narnia and ASOIAF (which also is a lot heavier on the Jesus stuff than Wrinkle) again.
Madeleine L’Engle was indeed a devoted Episcopalian. She was for many years “writer-in-residence” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, and she taught for at least a little while in an Episcopal school in Manhattan.
I’m pretty sure she did not like to be referred to as a “Christian” writer, but many of her themes do reflect a world view that meshes very well with liberal Protestantism, as **ISiddiqui **mentions above. I’ve spent several decades attending Episcopal services, and her works fit right into the kinds of sermons that get preached and the concerns that people in the congregation have. It’s familiar!
Fair Rarity, the complaints about the book, rather interestingly, generally come from people who also define themselves very much as Christians. Only they are much more conservative politically and theologically than L’Engle. They are uncomfortable with the whole idea of the three Mrs-es, who are, let’s face it, rather occulty in the way they are portrayed. They also do not like a scene which Ukulele Ike and Tzigone mentioned above, in which there is a conversation about Great People who are on the side of Light and Good. I believe Charles Wallace starts it off by coming up with Jesus, but pretty soon the characters are also naming Buddha and Leonardo daVinci and Pasteur and JS Bach. For some that seems to remove Jesus’s divinity and make him simply a person, when they believe he is and ought to be in a very different category from the others. Again–for a political and theological liberal, this passage doesn’t raise any eyebrows, let alone hackles, but for someone with a more conservative outlook, it can be quite problematic.
Even now, all these years after 1962, there is still a large percentage of the population of this country who hate a) nonconformists; b) strong females; and c) folks like Buddha, Bach, and Voltaire.
I don’t know why they’d be mad at Bach - I mean he was a faithful Lutheran ;). Although there were rumors he may have Catholic sympathies… that must be it!!
“How bad is “A Wrinkle in Time?” It’s so bad even Oprah Winfrey, Queen of the Universe, playing the Queen of the Universe, couldn’t save this cinematic disaster of epic proportions. In fact, she’s one of the many reasons for its abject failure as a film.”
Yes, folks like Voltaire were definitely applecart-upsetters, and it makes sense that some very very “devout” folks might not want to have anything to do with them even if they weren’t being mentioned in the same paragraph as Jesus.
But Bach–I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who objected to the music of Bach on standard Secular Humanist grounds. Perhaps most pronminently because so much of his music was in the service of God and the church…the B Minor Mass, the Passions, “Schafe Koennen Sicher Weiden,” Christmas Oratorio, and on and on. True, Art of the Fugue and the Coffee Cantata and the Brandenburgs and Air for the G String are secular–but they are not, what’s the word, aggressively so.
First of all, that review is terribly written. Secondly, he bashes the movie for not following the book adequately, then he complains that Dr. Murry is a scientist, (like he is in the book!) rather than a philosopher or theologian. I’m rather skeptical of his claim to have read the book as a child, frankly.
I understand the necessity of streamlining the story for the sake of a reasonable film runtime, so I’m not bothered about the reduction of Calvin’s arc, the missing twin brothers, the scrapping of the unicorn or the trips to the 2d world or Aunt Beast’s planet. But when the screenwriters filled in their own phrasings instead of the book’s language, it really stood out as being less poetic than L’engle’s phrasings.
The Mrses. were visually impressive but lacked gravitas to me. I also wasn’t a fan of how flippant they were? though I’m not sure if that’s a real flaw or just my own taste coming through. It’s been a while since I read the book but I remembered Mrs. Which’s quoting as being cute. In the movie it felt tiresome and I was glad when they dropped it.
Frylock, my recollection is that when the book was banned, it was banned pretty specifically for promoting witchcraft or undermining religious values, which are pretty hilariously stupid charges to anyone who’s read the book but people campaigning for the removal of books from school libraries very rarely make that effort.
I liked it overall; the casting was good and most of the impetus and plotline of the book was accurately rendered in the movie.
• I would have liked 45% less special-effects glitz
• I would have liked 20% more science-sounding and less woo-sounding explanation of the tesseract, and especially for Dr. Murry’s presentation of it to a roomful of scientists.
• I would have liked more elaboration, more examples, and more explicit discussion of Camazotz and the coercive conformity thereof. In particular, I remember the conversation in the book in which the dude with the red eyes glibly tries to equate equality, which Meg considers an admirable and valid goal, with sameness… and she catches the equivocation.
• The kids were excellent actors, with good chemistry and believability. I disagree somewhat about the concern that the “Mrs’s” were not done with sufficient gravitas. I recall them as being flippant and irreverent. I always pictured them in my mind more as rumpled disheveled witchy-looking and slightly ditzy-behaving old women with brilliant and sassy tongues; I didn’t envision them quite as glitzy as the movie did them, but Mrs. Whatsit was never supposed to be Mary Poppins. I visualized her more like Aunt Clara from Bewitched, in fact. Mrs. Which was the only one whose description conveyed anything akin to conventional gravitas, and Oprah Winfrey brought that in the movie (although she was more corporeal than the out-of-focus smear that L’Engle described).
