A Wrinkle in Time

As a child, I identified strongly with a certain kind of book heroine. She was bright, for all the good it did her. She got in trouble from it. She loved deeply, yes, but sometimes, she hated, too. There were people who didn’t like her because of the very same traits that made her appealing, at least to me. Often she had an adventure to go on. There were things to be resolved, and she needed to resolve them. Some of the heroines have aged poorly, I’ll admit, and others I haven’t read in years and barely remember. But I loved them all so much.

Meg Murry (Storm Reid) was one of the ones I loved. Meg was the daughter of Alex (Chris Pine) and Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). She has twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys (not appearing in this film), and as bright as Meg is she is nowhere near as smart as her younger (in this movie adopted) brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). But her father vanished four years earlier working on some project basically no one understands. Charles Wallace introduces her to Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who promises something is coming. Meg manages to befriend Calvin (Levi Miller) despite her problems at school, and then Charles Wallace takes them to Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and then Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) takes them to find Mr. Murry.

Meg is stubborn. She won’t listen to anyone unless they give her a good reason to. She has strong feelings, and she has a hard time not letting them pull her. She wants to be special, wants to matter, wants people to like her, but cannot be anyone other than who she is even for that. She has low self-esteem. She is lonely. She resists caring about people because it hurts. But when she does let someone in, they are in all the way and she will do anything for them.

A lot of people disapproved of this adaptation because the Murry family is multicultural. (In addition to the obvious, McCabe is of Filipino descent.) Personally, I was a lot more bothered by the missing twins than anything. And while there’s an interesting conversation possible about Charles Wallace feeling distant from his adoptive father who walked out on him, the movie didn’t do as much with that as it could, and it just implies that Charles Wallace should have some pretty hefty abandonment issues going.

Actually, one of the interesting things about the movie only exists because Meg isn’t the white girl originally described by Madeleine L’Engle. When the IT (voiced by David Oyelowo) shows her the idealized version she keeps within herself, that version of Meg has Good Hair. Gods know I am the wrong person to give any kind of involved treatise on hair and black girls, but it is worth noting that both Meg and Mrs. Murry have natural hair and the idealized Meg has had hers relaxed.

And look, I don’t blame Ava DuVernay for wanting to work with Oprah Winfrey given the chance. That said, she does tend to take over. It’s not that she’s without talent; I’ve seen The Color Purple. But that was a long time ago, and Oprah’s spent a long time as OPRAH. And casting her as Mrs. Which only reinforces that. It might have been interesting to cast her as Mrs. Whatsit instead, stumbling and fumbling and insulting Meg accidentally and making mistakes and feeling guilty. Gods know Oprah could stand to feel a little guilty right now.

It’s a beautiful movie, but any movie version of this is going to be missing something. There’s not enough time. There’s a thrown-out reference to Aunt Beast that will make fans of the book happy, but there’s so much missing—even in places where it’s word for word the book. Charles Wallace heats a lot of milk for cocoa early in the book because he knows other people will be there, but they aren’t in the movie in part because there are no twins to show up. The dog is there but only vaguely. We don’t fully get a feel for how people in town—now LA—see Calvin.

They’ve also moved a conversation that I know very well from being fairly early in the book to being at the end, change what names are mentioned, and remove the bit that I think has gotten L’Engle in a lot of trouble over the years. You see, I read the book one of the many times I’ve read it for a college independent study contract on banned books. This one gets challenged and banned a lot for supporting “New Age religion,” in part because Jesus is mentioned as one of Earth’s warriors against the dark without it being mentioned that he’s in any way different from Euclid. Those same people angry that the Murrys aren’t a white family must be furious that Jesus was replaced with Frida Kahlo and Maya Angelou.