'Wrinkle' neither folds nor soars

Visually abundant adaptation of popular novel falls short on wonder..

A New York Times article about the 90th edition of the Academy Awards referred to director Ava DuVernay (13th, Selma) as “one of Hollywood’s most aggressive advocates for diversity.” It only takes a few minutes of the big-screen adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time to know that DuVernay has no qualms about putting her convictions on screen.

A somewhat scattered, effects-laden adaptation of a popular novel by Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time stands as both an adventure fantasy and an overdue helping of diverse casting. Its story sends the child of an interracial couple into alternate universes along with her adopted brother and a white teenage boy.

That’s not to say that A Wrinkle in Time takes diversity as its theme. Like many of the Disney movies that precede it, Wrinkle is an ode to the importance of family, as well as a recasting of a typical hero’s journey.

The movie’s main character — a brainy 13-year-old named Meg (Storm Reid) — faces many tests as she tries to establish herself as a warrior for the light; i.e., all that is good in the universe.

DuVernay has said that her movie primarily aims at 12-year-olds and those able to get into a 12-year-old state of mind. As someone for whom 12 barely exists as a memory, I found the movie to be an elaborate helping of children’s theater that proved wanting at the point when it's supposed to reach its emotional crescendo and a little too vague about what constitutes evil in the movie’s visually abundant universe.

I also found the cosmology depicted in A Wrinkle in Time a bit confusing but that may not matter to young audiences willing to go with flow in order to enjoy the movie's various odd sights: a beach where a character who embodies evil (Michael Pena) turns up or a strange cave-like place that's home to Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis), a character whose name explains his outlook.

Though it brims with varied settings and costumes, the core of A Wrinkle in Time hinges on a simplistic binary battle between the light and the dark, evil being represented by a spidery looking creation that resembles an ink blot.

Three other-worldly beings serve as guides for young Meg’s journey, which involves something called a “tesseract.” As best as I could discern — and with help from Wikipedia — the tesseract is a phenomenon that creates folds in the fabric of space and time, allowing Meg and her companions to travel through the fifth dimension.

These guides are women with (what else?) special powers. Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) can turn herself into what looks like a giant green leaf that carries the movie’s adventurers like a magic carpet. Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) is a walking Bartlett’s book of quotations; she dispenses the wisdom of others. Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) seems to materialize out of nothing.

When we first meet Mrs. Which, she’s clad in silver and as tall as one of those balloons in a holiday parade, looming large over everyone else, a visual choice that mirrors Winfrey’s status in the real-life world of media.

Meg’s interplanetary journey is motivated by a devastating loss. Her father (Chris Pine) has been missing for four years as the result of a quest to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Meg was left to make do with her mom (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and her brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe).

Meg journeys into other worlds to locate her scientist father and bring him home because, as we long ago learned from the The Wizard of Oz, no matter how intoxicating alternate realities can be, there’s no place like home.

Levi Miller portrays Calvin O’Keefe, a popular teenager who joins outcast Meg on her trippy pursuits, but his character doesn't seem to have much of a role beyond adding someone with whom younger boys may identify.

First seen in Twelve Years A Slave, Reid provides the movie with a solid center. Initially annoying, McCabe’s Charles Wallace grew on me, particularly when his body was taken over by the IT, a disembodied evil that turns him from a brainiac into a painiac.

The movie’s production team does a good job creating wavy wrinkles in time as Meg travels in the fifth dimension, and the movie certainly doesn't lack for other forms of visual invention. My favorite: a rigidly conformist suburban community where every kid stands in a driveway bouncing a beach ball in unison, a twisted idea of playtime.

I suppose the best fantasies create a sense of wonder that Wrinkle in Time can't quite achieve. It's probably not the keenest of critical insights or the heartiest of endorsements, but after a preview screening and a little reflection, I'd say the movie qualifies as "OK." I'd be lying if I didn't say I was hoping for more.

A stirring moment for civil rights

David Oyelowo's performance as Martin Luther King anchors director Ava DuVernay's look at a landmark demonstration.

A few observations from the fine new movie Selma: Martin Luther King sometimes ate ravenously. He had difficult conversations with his wife, a woman forced to deal with matters as ominous as death threats while wondering about his relationships with other women. Like many busy men, he spent too much time away from his family, and he became the symbol for a movement that would have gone nowhere without the hard work of many others. On occasion, he smoked cigarettes.

All that's tactfully shown by director Ava DuVernay.

DuVernay's movie also makes it clear that King's rhetoric soared and inspired a nation, that he often put his body on the line to advance the cause of justice and that he understood how to move public opinion. He was the prophet who stood outside the gates of power, urging the powerful to help the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice, as he might have put it.

For all that, Selma isn't a King biopic: It's an entirely absorbing look at the landmark 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Stirring and sobering, Selma enables us to feel the urgency and complications of a moment when the wheel of history definitely was turning.

DuVernay surely knew that Dr. King already has been enshrined in the sacred pantheon of American greats. She's interested in the man who fought for civil rights, not the icon created by a self-congratulatory culture that belatedly lauds him.

As played by the gifted British actor David Oyelowo, Dr. King never wavers about his goal -- in this case gaining voting rights for black people in the Jim Crow South. He strategizes, looks for the best ways to dramatize each protest and bring repression to the forefront of American consciousness.

On occasion, he's beset by doubt, not about the cause, but about what he's asking others to sacrifice.

The first attempt to cross the bridge, of course, resulted in brutal attacks on 600 peaceful marchers by state and local law enforcement officials. DuVernay doesn't flinch from that violent reality, either.

These bridge scenes are mini-masterpieces of tension in which DuVernay makes terrific use of silence to create a sense of fearful anticipation. She allows us to feel what it must have been like for the marchers to see armed men -- some on horseback -- awaiting them on the other side of the bridge.

In Washington, a frustrated Johnson expresses annoyance with King for insisting on a voting rights bill so soon after Johnson had pushed a Civil Rights Bill through Congress. Eventually, the movie suggests, Johnson unleashed J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI (Dylan Baker) in an attempt to embarrass King with a purported recording of a sexual encounter. The recording was delivered to Mrs. King.

You may have read that this Johnson/Hoover alliance, along with other matters concerning LBJ, has been disputed by some. Don't let these criticisms sway you from the movie. Selma recognizes the scope of a movement that climbed the ladder of power. It shows disagreements that sometimes tore at the civil rights movement from within, but also how its force rippled all the way to the White House. I'd argue that DuVernay appreciates the difference between a president and someone who's pushing that president to act.

History, of course, is seldom as tidy as we'd like in to be. Young black activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee had been working in Selma before King and his Southern Christian Leadership contingent arrived. Initially, they viewed King as a celebrity interloper, a man who wanted to cash in on the grunt work they'd been doing.

King knew they had a point, but also understood that the movement needed a figure head and a voice. He thought he and his colleagues were best suited to calling attention to a movement based on a three-part approach that already had produced results: negotiation, demonstration and resistance.

The days leading up to Selma were full of stark contrasts. Perhaps that's why DuVernay begins in 1964 with Dr. King receiving the Nobel Prize in Oslo. He shares a fancy hotel room with his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo).

Oyelowo's subtly tuned performance picks up the irony of the situation -- he's enjoying comfort in Norway while many were suffering at home. Oyelowo lets us know that King realizes that his work isn't finished. His eyes are on a bigger prize than any that could be awarded in Europe.

DuVernay takes us from Stockholm to the Birmingham bombing that resulted in the death of four black girls. She then shows us obstacles put in the way of Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), a black woman who's trying to register to vote in Selma. Cooper is given a ridiculous qualifying test in which she's asked to name every county judge in Alabama.

Working from a screenplay by Paul Webb, DuVernay evokes a potent feeling for the time -- its ugliness, its idealism, its internecine battles, its heroism and breadth.

King may have endured his dark nights of the soul, but he also was a great man, and his speeches (adapted here from originals) still produce goose bumps. It doesn't take a perfect man to speak to the conscience of a nation. It takes a man who's brilliant, brave and right about the justness of his cause.

Many of the supporting performances are spot on. Tim Roth, for example, makes a convincingly appalling George Wallace, the Alabama governor who thought he just might be shrewd enough outfox Lyndon Johnson.

Selma also introduces the supporting cast that surrounded Dr. King, figures such as Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson), Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) and John Lewis (Stephan James).

As you look at DuVernay's images of the march, you'll be reminded of an important truth. Prominent figures are seen leading marchers across the Pettus Bridge. But when demonstrators finally headed for Montgomery, it wasn't the people in the front of the line who turned a protest into a movement. It was everyone who marched along -- taking the rest of the country with them.

Selma serves as a look at a fascinating collection of real-life characters, as an ultra-dramatic rendering of a tumultuous moment and perhaps as a goad: The march may not look the same today, but there's still much to overcome.

History served up in bold slices

It takes liberties with the real man's life, but Lee Daniels' The Butler works as a tumultuous summary of the Civil Rights era.

August isn't a bad month for critics to stop paying attention to movies. As we inch toward Labor Day, the releases tend to have the feel of filler. A look at the multiplex schedule makes you wonder whether Hollywood isn't marking time until the Oscar-bound big boys lumber into view.

All of this by way of saying that I've been traveling, and haven't seen my usual quota of movies, a situation that in late August can be seen as more reprieve than deprivation.

Was I bereft that I missed the preview screening of Kick-Ass 2? If so, it was only because airline re-routing had condemned my wife and her quick-to-grumble husband to an interminable day of schedule shuffling, plane delays and airborne discomfort.

Upon my return to Denver, I decided that there was only one movie I needed to see to fill in my otherwise empty dance card: Lee Daniels' The Butler, the story of Cecil Gaines, a black man who served as a butler in the White House from the time of President Eisenhower until the reign of Ronald -- a.k.a. the Great Communicator -- Reagan.

I should confess that I'm not much of a Daniels' fan. I didn't jump on the Precious (2009) bandwagon, and I found 2012's The Paperboy to be mired in excess bordering on hysteria, a wallowing and sweaty movie that, at one point, saw Nicole Kidman's character urinate on Zac Efron's character, one of the few times I hoped that special effects had indeed supplanted any attempt at realism.

I was much relieved to discover that The Butler -- though vividly realized -- represents a toned-down version of Daniels-style drama.

First, my problem:
Too many years in journalism have, I think, stunted my imagination. When I read about the divergence between fact and fiction in a movie that's depicting a slice of history, I tend to feel a bit deflated. Look, I know there can be a crucial difference between truth and fact, but too many years in newsrooms have made me partial to historical drama that limits distortion to mild flirtation.

To the point: Daniels and screenwriter Daniel Strong, who also wrote HBO's Game Change, have taken considerable liberties with their main character, played with admirable reserve by Forest Whitaker.

Gaines was inspired by the real-life story of a man named Eugene Allen, who worked for 34 years in the White House. In the movie, Gaines' oldest son (ably played by David Oyelowo)becomes contemptuous of his father's calling during the Civil Rights era.

Oyelowo's Louis is a convenient fictional creation, a young man who makes the transition from a hopeful freedom rider to a resolute member of the Black Panther party, an arc that describes the historical backdrop against which the story unfolds and which adds a dose of generational tension to the story.

During the movie, Gaines' wife, brilliantly played by Oprah Winfrey, has an affair with a neighbor (Terrence Howard), presumably because she's upset and lonely. Her duty-obsessed husband isn't around much. Evidently, the real butler's wife was loyal and devoted.

In the movie, the couple's youngest son (Elijah Kelley) dies in Vietnam. In real life, the Gaines' only son returned from Vietnam and went on to find employment in the State Department.

I've gotten all of this from an Aug. 16 article in Time; I repeat highlights of that story more to reveal my own bias than to debunk the movie, which -- in the broadest terms -- is successful.

And, yes, I understand the approach. Daniels uses Gaines' personal history as a point of expansion, a spine that allows him to tell a story that's bigger and more important than one man's life.

In taking this fictionalized look at a man who served in the White House, Daniels also charts the sweep of the Civil Rights movement, and he makes effective use of news footage that seems no less shocking now than it did during the heyday of a grassroots movement that changed the United States.

Moroever, only a couple of scenes -- an explosive argument at a dinner table and a pointless interlude involving Mrs. Gaines' dalliance with her neighbor -- push the movie into what looks like familiar, i.e., over-amped, Daniels' territory.

More often than not, though, the rough candor in Daniels' style serves the screenplay, which won't be mistaken for anyone's idea of a finesse job. Right from its start, The Butler makes bold points boldly, which may be precisely what the material demands.

Now, some side comments: It's amazing to me that a personality as identifiable as Winfrey was able to convince us that she's the whiskey tippling, sometimes resentful wife of a man who learned the butler's trade at an early age.

Young Gaines was brought into "the big house" by a racist Georgia woman (Vanessa Redgrave in a small role) who schooled Gaines in domestic servitude after her son raped the boy's mother and shot his father.

Many presidents appear during the course of the story, some effectively portrayed, some less so. Robin Williams plays Eisenhower, although he looks like a dead ringer for Harry Truman. James Marsden capture's JFK's voice, but looks too much like a frat boy to be entirely convincing. Alan Rickman makes a surprisingly good Reagan. Ditto for Liev Schreiber as the blunt Lyndon B. Johnson.

Whoever had the idea of casting John Cusack as Nixon probably thinks Silicon Valley is best known for its fine macrame. Perhaps Jane Fonda's inevitably ironic appearance as Nancy Reagan makes up for it.

So what the hell am I saying here? Yes, I felt a bit of a letdown when I began reading about the real White House butler who inspired the movie and whose life was first written about by Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood.

But watching The Butler is another story. Daniels evokes a strong feeling for the chaotic blend of horror and idealism that marked a period when some of the best people in the country were -- as Martin Luther King famously said -- trying to bend the moral arc of the universe toward a higher plane of justice.