Wonderstruck

Wonderstruck (2017) is a highly inventive film, lovingly detailed and directed with the utmost intelligence and precision.  But it's also an example of the truism that the sum of the parts doesn't always equal an excellent or successful whole -- something seems subtly wrong with this movie despite the skill with which it has been made.  The picture is ultimately too implausible to make much sense as a realistic depiction of events; and, yet, the film is also too rooted in realistic detail to succeed as a fantasy.  Rather, Wonderstruck seems trapped somehow by its own excellence -- the more exquisitely detailed and realistic the settings and furnishings of the film, the more the picture's implausibility grates on the viewer.  We're left with a wonderful spectacle that doesn't cohere on any level, a cornucopia of images that can't quite be assimilated to any meaning. 

Based on a book by Brian Selznick, Todd Haynes, the director, positions the movie as made for children, or, at least, young adults.  In this regard, the movie seems similar to Hugo, Scorsese's film for young people -- a movie that also was better in parts than whole.  The film's rhythm is peculiar and slightly rebarbative from the start:  two parallel stories are intercut,   The cutting between the stories relies on visual rhymes -- for instance, a boy has a telescope and yearns to visit outer space; fifty years earlier, a girl tears pictures of movie stars from a magazine.  The girl takes a ferry to Manhattan; we see the boy arrive at the 42nd Street Terminal on a bus, and so on.  The story set in 1927 is filmed in beautiful black and white and staged like a silent movie -- one can see clear influences from Murnau's Sunrise and King Vidor's The Crowd in these sequences.  The parallel story is set in 1977, shot by the great Ed Lachmann in warm, honey-colored hues, although the setting is the incredibly filthy and crowded streets around Times Square, a grimy terrain populated by rats and all sorts of menacing hoodlums, pimps and whores.  The two stories are designed to coalesce into a single narrative, achieved in the film's final twenty minutes -- a denouement that requires so much narrative crammed into so few minutes as to seem exceedingly rushed and, even, contrived.  The parallel stories are so densely intercut (each narrative involving a child running away from home to Manhattan) that neither plot ever really seems to advance in a satisfactory way -- the intercutting seems to truncate both stories into odd, beautifully shot fragments too short to really secure our emotional investment. 

The film's governing metaphor is a collector's Cabinet of Wonders -- indeed, the boy's 1977 flight to Manhattan is based upon his discovery of a book with that title bearing two traces of his absent father:  an inscription and a book mark advertising a used book emporium on 72nd Street called Kincaid's.  The actual Cabinet of Wonders was an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in 1927, an ornate room filled with weird skeletal specimens, meteors, gems, and other curiosities.  Midway through the boy discovers that the Cabinet, dusty and decrepit, is hidden in a storeroom at the Museum.  This is the first of several discoveries, most of them crammed into the movie's last few minutes, that are supposed to unify the two narratives and draw them into a single plot -- that is, the boy's discovery of his true heritage.  In keeping with the theme of a Cabinet of Wonders, the movie is filled with all sorts of extraordinary things:  there is a beautifully simulated silent movie called "The Daughter of the Storm" including a startling image of a house blown apart by the wind; we tour the collections of the Museum of Natural History and see remarkable dioramas full of stuffed predators and prey; the recreation of the squalid but vibrant Times Square milieu is as good as Taxi Driver (which could shoot that terrain as it actually existed) -- in fact, the recreation of 70's New York is better than anything you can see in movies dating from that period:  somehow, it seems more authentic and more real than the real thing.  There are meteorites and meteor showers, a historic power-outage, sequences that show the viewer how to sign in  ASL (American Sign Language) -- both of the heroes are deaf --and, finally, we see a vast scale model of New York with all its boroughs (this is the panorama at the Queens Museum on the site of the 1964 Worlds' Fair); the characters carefully stride along rivers, daintily stepping over the great bridges that lead to Manhattan.  The set decoration is marvelous -- a recreation of used book store circa 1977 is so distinct and perfect that you can almost smell the decaying books, the dust, the aroma of the tea that the proprietor is sipping:  in the background, you can pick out Gravity's Rainbow in the original paperback edition, the Dover book of Hogarth's engravings with Lichtenberg's surreal detailed commentaries, a record of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde set like a totem among the shelves.

The film's plot is too complex to be summarized.  It suffices to say that an orphan seeks his father by running away from Gunflint, Minnesota.  The boy has been recently deafened by a lightning strike that surged through the telephone he was holding to his ear -- this seems improbable to me.  Gunflint, Minnesota looks like Detroit with a big ornate bus station.  It's obvious that the people who made this movie had no idea what Northern Minnesota is like and didn't care either about truthfulness with regard to that aspect of this film -- this seems disappointing and a missed opportunity since Northern Minnesota along the Gunflint Trail is certainly remarkable enough in itself.  Thus, we don't get any contrast between rural (northern) Minnesota and the City -- something that would, in fact, improve the film substantially, although I suppose that in the places where this picture was shown, most audiences wouldn't care that the depiction of the North Star State is so palpably false.  Intercut with boy's adventures is the story of deaf girl living in 1927 who flees her tyrannical father for Manhattan where she seeks out her movie star mother, Lillian Mayhew (played by Julianne Moore).  The girl's parents are divorced and neither of them seems to care much for her.  Ultimately, the girl finds her way to the Natural History Museum where she meets her brother, employed there as a diorama-maker.  The boy in the modern story also finds his way to the Natural History Museum where he meets a playmate, a young African-American kid.  The two boys hide in the museum after hours where a sort of idyll occurs -- this sequence is strangely dull, indeed, so bafflingly boring that  you struggle to keep your eyes open.  The fact is that the idyll is, indeed, nothing more than a hiatus in the action.  After the romp in the museum, the boy finds his way to Kincaid's Bookstore.  There he meets an old woman (also played by Julianne Moore) who is deaf and dumb.  Needless, to say this woman is the boy's grandmother and the protagonist of the 1927 story.  The woman takes the boy to the New York City panorama in Queens and there writes out, at length, her autobiography which is read over drone shots taken of the remarkable 160 foot long scale model of the city.  At this point, Haynes seems to channel his earlier self -- the flamboyantly gay and rebellious director who first made his mark with Superstar -- The Story of Karen Carpenter, a forty-minute film staged entirely with Barbie dolls.  Haynes uses miniatures to depict the events narrated by the deaf and dumb woman -- in fact, her grandson is reading aloud from the notes that she has written on her pad of paper.  The miniatures are little figures with the faces of the characters embedded in tiny figures with heads shaped like hand-mirrors (the effect is a little trashy -- in a good way, like an assemblage by Edward Kienholz.)  This brings us to the film's climax, involving the 1977 summer power outage, the darkened Manhattan skyline, and a falling star streaking across the constellations now visible in the gloom above the shadowy city. 

There's simply too much in this movie:  we have a repressed memory, a nightmare involving pursuing wolves that must be explicated, a meteor at the end of the movie and a great meteorite in the museum, the power-outage, the menacing "mean streets" of Manhattan that turn out to be warm and hospitable, the incredible costumes depicting how people dressed in the seventies, the silent movie pastiches in the black and white story from 1927, dissertations on museums and curating, on American Sign Language, and on the silent film as an art form related to the silent world of the two characters making their way to the ultimate encounter at the film's end.  It's all exhausting and you expect some sort of catharsis, but the movie is so complex that when you should be feeling emotions, you are actually distracted by trying to figure out the wildly improbable plot.  That said, shot by shot and scene by scene the film is dauntingly brilliant -- and it has a fantastic sound track, music by Carter Burwell, funk tunes from the seventies, Eno and Fripp's ambient music, David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and the disco version of Thus Spake Zarathustra.