A NEW WRINKLE

Opening this week:

A Wrinkle in Time—14-year-old Storm Reid plays heroine Meg Murray in this first big-screen adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's much-loved novel of 1962. She brings the role a sober, guarded manner that is very touching. Meg's father (Chris Pine), a scientist who was working on a method of instantaneous time/space travel called a "tesseract," disappeared a few years earlier, and Meg's thick glasses and mop of curls can't hide her pain and anger at the loss, or her worry about its implications for her family. They can't hide her intelligence, either.

Young Reid is impressive; unfortunately she's the best thing about the movie. I read and liked the book as a kid, though it wasn't the knockout for me that it was for many readers of my generation. The makers of this version, however, seem to have missed the book's charming originality: It's an epic sci-fi tale told in the prosaic manner of a rural-Connecticut adolescent coming-of-age story, with a strong undercurrent of liberal-ecumenical Christianity (L'Engle was a devout Episcopalian). In its less ambitious way, it prefigures the Harry Potter books, with their inspired blend of high fantasy and school story.

The difference in the approach of director Ava DuVernay and the screenwriters, Jennifer Lee and John Stockwell, shows up nowhere more plainly than in the characterizations of the dotty Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), the quotation-spouting Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and the lofty Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who take Meg, her prodigal little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and her school friend Calvin (Levi Miller) on an odyssey to distant worlds in search of the missing dad. In the book, the three strange, kindly ladies are venerable old bats.

In the film, they are glitzed-out in costumes and makeup that seem more appropriate to a Mardi Gras parade float, or maybe a Bette Midler back-up singer from the '70s. All three are formidable actresses, of course, and Kaling, in the most enigmatic role, makes good use of her sly, knowing smile. But on the whole, as New Age angels, the trio feels ersatz and unconvincing and simply way too young.

This feel extends to the production as a whole. Backed by a bottomless Disney budget, this Wrinkle in Time turns into a typical blockbuster effect spectacle. There are times when this generates some magic, as when Mrs. Whatsit takes the kids on an aerial tour of a paradisiacal planet. But at least as often, the story gets lost or disjointed in all that CGI, and the pace curdles.

The movie has its vivid moments, particularly in the visit to Camazotz, a world of conformity where the inhabitants are in thrall to IT (here called, for some reason, "The IT."), a sinister alien entity. There's a sunlit spookiness to the scene in which our heroes pass through a cul-de-sac of stucco houses, which looks startlingly like a subdivision in west Phoenix, and see children bouncing identical red balls in unison before their midcentury-magazine-cover moms call them inside to eat. Still, there may be something disingenuous about a movie from this particular voracious conglomerate inveighing against social uniformity. After dinner, I bet all those kids sit down to watch the Disney Channel.

The Leisure Seeker—The title refers to a faded ‘70s-era Winnebago in which an elderly married couple decide to take a last road trip, from Wellesley, Massachusetts to Key West, Florida. John (Donald Sutherland), a retired English professor, has Alzheimer’s, but can still pilot the huge vehicle, and Ella (Helen Mirren), a cheerful southern belle, is determined that that they will at long last make the trip to see the house of John's literary hero Hemingway.

So while their kids (Christian McKay and Janel Maloney) sit home and worry, Ella does her best to navigate both the roads and her husband’s ever-shifting mental state. One minute he's holding forth on literature to a waitress, or remembering a former student with perfect clarity, and seconds later he's monosyllabic and primal, like the half-wit handyman Sutherland played in Die! Die! My Darling! back in 1965. Painful, long-held family secrets leak out, and in the movie's one ripe moment of satire, we see John, a lifelong Democrat, wander off and happily join in cheering at a Trump rally.

Directed by Paolo Virzi from a novel by Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker shows some signs of having sat on the shelf for a while; for one thing, Dick Gregory, who died in August of last year, has a small but funny role in it. It's a highly uneven movie, with many heavy-handed episodes and some curious loose ends. But the star power of the leads makes it moving, both in the tragedy, and the grim comedy, of dementia, and in the exhilaration of travel.

BRAIN/BIRD

Opening this weekend:

Inside Out— This animated feature dramatizes the workings of the human mind by personifying the emotions, in this case those of a 12-year-old girl named Riley. Working in a NASA-like mission control is our heroine Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a radiant Tinkerbell-like sprite determined to keep Riley happy; she’s supported by Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and frumpy, blue-skinned Sadness (Phyllis Smith).

The team’s job is to create memories, here seen as tiny transparent globes glowing with their emotional coloring—gold for Joy, red for Anger, and so forth. Joy tries hard to keep Sadness from touching Riley’s memories and tingeing them blue, but when Riley moves from Minnesota, where she has a best friend and plays hockey, to San Francisco, Joy finds it much harder to suppress Sadness.

Eventually the emotional crises that come with a move during childhood cause Joy and Sadness to get separated from the headquarters, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust in charge. The rest of the movie concerns their Bunyan-esque journey through Riley’s personality to take over again in headquarters.

The conceit of this movie isn’t new. It wasn’t new as the premise of the early-‘90s Fox sitcom Herman’s Head, and wasn’t even new as one of the funnier segments of Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) or the 1970 movie of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. It goes back through the Good and Evil Angels that appear on the shoulders of cartoon characters, and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, through medieval morality plays to the Psychomachia of the Roman poet Prudentius.

But it’s possible that no one’s ever done this idea quite as well as Inside Out. One’s expectations for Pixar’s features tend to be pretty high, but even so I wasn’t prepared for how deeply imagined this movie is, or how emotionally potent. Or, for that matter, how wise: the theme is emotional gestalt, and the role of sadness in a healthy personality.

I walked out of the theatre feeling like I’d seen a masterpiece, and a few days later this doesn’t feel like an overreaction. It may be the best movie I’ve seen all year. My only concern is that Inside Out is so fast and complex that some of its subtleties may get past smaller children—the gags about abstract thought could leave a college kid studying for a psych final feeling confused. But even so, the movie is so full of color and comedy that kids will likely enjoy it even if they don’t entirely get it.

Opening today at FilmBar Phoenix:

I Am Big Bird—Well, maybe it isn’t quite as soul-stirring a line as “I Am Spartacus.” But only maybe. Certainly the title avian has had a longer and happier career than the hapless gladiator.

Subtitled The Caroll Spinney Story, this documentary chronicles the life of the puppeteer who has given soul to the towering, yellow-plumed fowl, the long-beaked, guileless face of Sesame Street. A soft-spoken Bostonian with a narrow, goateed hippie’s face, Spinney has performed both the childlike Big Bird and, for a bit of Hyde to go with that Jekyll, the curmudgeonly Oscar the Grouch for more than forty years.

Directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker and partly funded via Kickstarter, the film is smoothly made if fairly conventional as cinema. It's helped along because Spinney’s life, even before his Sesame Street days, seems to have been unusually well-documented, first by home movies and later, after his marriage to Debra Gilroy in 1979, by home video. It’s the content, however, that makes this the most fascinating show business documentary I’ve seen since, at least, Andrew Leavold’s The Search for Weng Weng.

I’ve been a Sesame Street fan since the show started—I clearly remember watching the first episode, and I watched it religiously for years even though I was too old for it, educationally speaking (I already knew how to read and count). I loved the show simply because it was genuinely funny, and had richer characters than almost any live-action show aimed at kids (or, for the most part, adults) at the time. Oscar was a special favorite of mine from the first.

Even so, I Am Big Bird was full of stuff I didn’t know. It covers everything from Spinney’s difficult relationship with his father to Big Bird’s visits to China to Mitt Romney’s backfired shot at PBS in the 2012 election—probably an attempt, tactically idiotic, to throw red meat to that part of the reactionary Right that hates Sesame Street for being multicultural propaganda (which it certainly is)—to Spinney’s startling near-miss with another historical moment.

But probably nothing in I Am Big Bird is as astounding as the technical explanation of how Big Bird works, and what that has meant, for Spinney and his apprentices, over the years. As a physical acting challenge it makes, say, a DeNiro weight gain or a Christian Bale weight loss look like a walk in the park.