A Wrinkle in Time
I'm not the partisan of the books that many of my friends are; none of this is sour grapes, or the sort of proprietary feelings many Tolkien purists have against the Jackson Middle-earth films. Any criticisms I have of the film are simply based on its own merits, and not proprietary feelings about a book I haven't read cover to cover in decades. Broadly speaking, I would say that the film succeeds most as a domestic drama about a child from a mixed-race family seeking an absent father (the only other film I've seen by this director is Selma, a powerful, realistic drama about the struggle against racial prejudice. Given that, it may not be surprising that the single scene from this film that sticks with me the most strongly is Meg's worrying about her hair: exactly the sort of scene one rarely sees in a Hollywood choked with the latest Harry Potter clones, where people of color play subsidiary roles, if they appear at all.
Alas, the rest of the film- the fantasy sections- is far less successful: over-earnest writing, with many tone-deaf lines of dialogue; backed up by mediocre visuals and an over-reliance on CGI (and occasional jaw-dropping moments such as The Attack of the 50-Foot Oprah.) This isn't surprising: fantasy and realistic drama are very different genres, and it's the rare director (such as, of course, Spielberg) who can do the two equally well. I do find the sheer existence of this film, in which a white sidekick tags along in the wake of a girl of color, encouraging; movies such as this and Black Panther1 encourage me by their sheer existence, by the cultural movement of inclusiveness they represent. In this days of our racist dumpster fire of a President, that in itself is no trivial accomplishment.
1I did like Black Panther (which has already grossed a billion dollars- yeah, I think we'll be seeing more inclusive movies of this sort); for me, the two keystone moments of that film, far more so than teh comic book heroics, were Killmonger's asking the white museum attendant if her museum had paid fair market value for the African artifacts it displays, and the simple moment of the jet plying through the cloaking shield into Wakanda: "We're home." Home, to an African nation that has never known a colonizer's boot; home, to a land of kings and queens, not the troubled ex-cons who seem to inhabit far too many narratives about black superheroes (Luke Cage, I'm looking at you). Home.