![]() ![]() Oprah Winfrey, in a bit of casting almost too spot-on, is Which, the wisest of them all. Wearing patchwork dresses of satins and embroidered materials, she looks as though a fabric store had exploded around her, but Kaling pulls it off. There is a mischievous gleam in her eye when she says “‘Tomorrow there’ll be more of us’ – Miranda, American,” quoting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. “‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’ – Rumi, Persian,” she says. ![]() Mindy Kaling is Who, the one who speaks by quoting great thinkers and writers. Reese Witherspoon is the energetic Whatsit, at two billion years old the baby of the group, who blurts out her skepticism about Meg. Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which are magical creatures made of light who take human form, with elaborate costumes and make-up, while playing fairy godmothers to Meg. The inclusive concept is brought to life by Storm Reid, an extraordinarily talented young actor who captures all of Meg’s self-doubts, stubbornness and love for her father.ĭuVernay’s high-profile casting turns out to be inspired too. ![]() Her mother, also a physicist, is Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Her father, a Nasa scientist whose time-travel discovery has left him lost in another world, is played by Chris Pine. DuVernay’s Meg is bi-racial, a heroine for our times. Those expectations were justified because there is a spark of brilliance in DuVernay’s reinvention of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel, already ahead of its time in portraying a scientifically-gifted girl. Black Panther is the most radical blockbuster ever Red Sparrow is a ‘painfully unsexy thriller’ Without the weight of high expectations, Wrinkle would look like a perfectly good Disney movie bound to appeal to its target audience of 10-year-old girls, and not so much to anyone hoping for dazzling film-making. Yet the stumbles in creating the alternate worlds Meg visits make the film less spectacular than viewers might have hoped, and at times a bit flat. From its sublime casting to its big-hearted message, there is much that is appealing in this fantasy about Meg Murry, a girl who travels through space and time to rescue her missing father, and finds her own confidence along the way. Ava DuVernay’s charming, spirited, Oprah-fied version of A Wrinkle in Time arrives as the victim of its own hype. ![]()
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