Zach Galifanakis – Memphis Flyer

In situations such as we find ourselves in now, I like to remind readers of Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude towards literary adaptations. When asked by Francois Truffaut if he would ever make a movie of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment, he said no. “In Dostoevsky’s novel there are many, many words, and all of them have a function.”

A great book does more than just tell a story. The writer’s use of language itself is a part of the magic. Having the voice of the author whispering in your head is an entirely different experience than sitting in a theater watching a moving image with an audience. What works very well in one medium will not be as effective when translated into another medium. The best books for adaptations are tightly edited page turners with strong stories. Hitchcock’s observation is boiled down to the dictum “Mediocre books make the best movies.”

Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit walks the meadows of the utopian planet Uriel in A Wrinkle In Time.

A Wrinkle In Time is not a mediocre book. Therein lies the problem with the Disney-produced, Ava DuVernay-directed screen adaptation.

A Wrinkle In Time was a Harry Potter-sized literary sensation when it was first published in 1962. Author Madeline L’Engle drew on her own experiences as an awkward late bloomer to create Meg Murry, the thirteen year old protagonist. Meg begins the novel in the midst of a hurricane of sadness and self doubt that seems to have become an actual hurricane outside the cozy old house where she lives with her brother Charles Wallace and her scientist mother. Her father has been missing for four years, which is the source of much of her angst. The neighbors and the kids at school gossip that he was a deadbeat who ran out on his young family, but, given that he was a rouge NASA scientist who was studying higher dimensional physics, the Murry family hopes that he went somewhere more otherworldly, and might one day return.

Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which and Storm Reid as Meg Murry

DuVernay’s casting instincts are good. Storm Reid plays Meg with a confidence that belies her age. The otherworldly trio of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) , proto-Time Lord, alien/angel hybrids who travel the cosmos by folding space with their minds, are all spot in. But much of their work in this visually dense film was done in solitude against green screens, and it shows. The same goes for former Peter Pan, Levi Miller, who plays Meg’s companion Calvin, and Deric McCabe who plays Charles Wallace. Faring much better is Zach Galifanakis as The Happy Medium, the oracle the children consult on their search for their missing father, who is played by the ever versatile Chris Pine. The Medium’s world of precariously balanced crystals is one of several compelling visual moments DuVernay and her crew conjure, but the film is so disjointed that it cannot sustain any momentum for long.

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who

L’Engle’s prose is masterfully compact and often lyrical. She never talks down to her young audience, but uses the limitations of the children’s book to her advantage. But the novel is very much of its time. She was a devout Christian with the education to understand cutting edge science; one way to look at A Wrinkle In Time is as her attempt to reconcile the revelations of cosmology and quantum mechanics with old fashioned American transcendentalism. Her philosophy and imagery were absorbed by the kids of the early sixties, resurfaced when those kids got psychedelicized after the Summer of Love, and later incorporated into New Age mysticism. Her descriptions of the rolling, otherworldly fields of the planet Uriel are rewards themselves. But when they’re rendered as Disney-fied CGI, and characters just stand there and look at them, they’re not so interesting.

Mega Oprah

The root of her vision of evil is the false happiness of enforced conformity, and that’s not a can of worms the capitalist Disney corporation wants to open. L’Engle’s strength is the internal struggles of her young characters, but that’s not something that translates well to the screen, which is all about external appearances. Instead, L’Engle’s admonitions to embrace your weirdness are reduced to forced whimsey. While I have no doubt the message is needed by America’s young women of color, there’s only so much empowering affirmation you can take in one sitting, even when it’s coming from a 30-foot Mega Oprah. A Wrinkle In Time was long thought to be unfilmable, and this version suggests that conventional wisdom was right.

Every once in a while, a film comes along that starkly divides critics and audiences. I usually take this as a sign that an artist has taken a chance and created something new. That is the case with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, a sprawling, thrilling film that, for better and worse, is one of the most fully realized personal visions to hit screens in years.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor famous for playing a superhero named Birdman in the 1990s, but who fell into relative obscurity after leaving the role following three highly successful Hollywood blockbusters. Now, he is attempting a comeback by staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the pressure of writing, directing, and producing the play with his own money is driving him slowly insane as opening night approaches. He starts to believe he has telekinetic powers that only manifest themselves when others aren’t around. And maybe he does — Birdman is not the kind of movie that gives you simple answers to the questions it poses.

The mixture of reality and fantasy extends past the screen, as there is no escaping the comparisons between Keaton, who went into semi-retirement on his ranch in Montana after capping a brilliant career in the 1980s with two Batman movies for director Tim Burton. I don’t know if Keaton, who is riveting in the film’s make-or-break role, thinks he can move things with his mind in real life, but I’m pretty sure Iñárritu does. The technical challenges he called on his cast and crew to overcome in this film rival the most complex in history. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for his work on Gravity, take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and stage the entire film as one continuous shot. Hitchcock did it in 1948’s Rope, which takes place almost entirely in one New York apartment. Similarly, all of Birdman happens in and around the historic St. James Theatre in Times Square, but digital technology has given Lubezki much more freedom of movement than Hitch enjoyed. The camera functions almost as another character in the film, swooping through corridors and spying on the players as they struggle through a parade of theatrical disasters.

and Michael Keaton in Birdman

A host of excellent actors revolve around Keaton, delivering uniformly awesome performances. Most surprising is comedian Zach Galifanakis as Jake, Thomson’s long suffering manager. Edward Norton turns in a wry, self-depreciating turn as Mike, a hotshot actor who is called in at the last minute to replace a crappy thespian whom Thomson may or may not have tried to kill with his telekinesis. Emma Stone is excellent as Sam, Thomson’s resentful, just-out-of-rehab daughter who is struggling to stay straight as she chafes at even the low level of control her father tries to impose on her.

Birdman works as a Noises Off-style backstage comedy, but it is just as much an essay on what the creative process looks like from the inside. Iñárritu tells as clear a story as he ever has in his career, but it’s clear that plot is a secondary consideration for the director. He enthusiastically pours ideas big and small onto the screen and doesn’t seem particularly concerned if all of them register with the audience or not. By making the bad guy Lindsay Duncan’s Tabitha, a snarling New York Times theater critic who promises to savage the play out of spite before she has even seen it, he is all but daring folks like me to criticize him. Several have taken him up on the dare, and now it’s my turn:

Can it with the false endings, Iñárritu. I counted three places where Birdman could have ended on a more satisfying note without sacrificing any of the power or themes that you spent so much time and energy conjuring. C’mon, Poltergeist was 30 years ago. Popular screenwriting books have made false endings fashionable again, but they have become a crutch that filmmakers lean on to avoid making the hardest choices. Pick an ending and go with it.

Wow. That felt refreshingly honest. Just like Birdman!