It’s hard to imagine Todd Haynes, one of the subversive and experimental filmmakers in America, training his lens on a commercial children’s adventure. Yet “Wonderstruck,” adapted from a hefty YA novel by Brian Selznick, exists, and for the most part it works.
As with Haynes’ previous efforts “Carol,” “Far From Heaven” and “Velvet Goldmine,” “Wonderstruck” is a period piece with a fetish for the periods—in this case the movie’s intercut storylines beginning in Minnesota in 1977 and New Jersey in 1927. In the former narrative, the inquisitive Ben (Oakes Fegley), orphaned after the fluke death of his mother (Michelle Williams), is struck by lightning, which renders him deaf. It’s in this state that he steals away on a bus to New York City with a clue that might lead him to his father, whom he’s never met.
In the latter story, Rose (newcomer Millicent Simmonds), a child born deaf but with a talent for architecture, escapes an oppressive father and a broken home for the unknown metropolis of Manhattan, where she hopes to meet a silent-film star (Julianne Moore) over whom she obsesses.
The similarities between the twin tales are self-evident and underlined for emphasis: Two children, stripped of the sense of sound, meander through the same alien metropolis to satiate their curiosity and quell their loneliness. Both journeys crucially terminate at the Museum of Natural History, where a mountain of improbable revelations unspools.
This tender, gentle movie is propelled by New Age-y logic that trumpets predestination, synchronicity, and the interconnectedness of the universe, especially the way the past comments on and echoes the present. Even if you believe this stuff, as I generally do, the approach can feel twee. It’s a film that invites critics and audiences to dismiss it as precious.
What redeems this premise and elevates the movie well beyond its literary source material is Haynes’ daring structuralism. While the more contemporary story is told with sound, the 1927 narrative is presented as a bona fide silent movie, in grainy black and white with a front-and-center Carter Burwell score that pays both sumptuous and subtle homage to the cinema of the 1920s.
This coup de grace goes beyond the immersive aspect of placing us firmly in Rose’s soundless world. It also offers a bold challenge to its audience—especially youth moviegoers accustomed to constant stimulation—to discover cinema anew as a distinctly visual medium. There’s a 20-minute-or-so stretch of “Wonderstruck” in which no dialogue is exchanged, and it’s both purer and more visually inventive than a recent work of self-conscious kitsch like “The Artist.”
Left to create our own narrative bridges without the aid of spoken words, we become attuned to the remarkable visual details of the two worlds. The production design is deftly and carefully realized, from the glamorous, flapper-filled New York City of the pre-Depression boom to the filthy metropolis of the late 1970s, a cityscape vivid with urban decay. We’re equally drawn to the non-spoken aural stimuli; Burwell’s score moves the ‘20s portion along with orchestral grace, and the soul, funk and rock selections for the 1970s segments create an indelible sense of time and place.
Unabashed in its sentiment, “Wonderstruck” delivers satisfying closure, dutifully solving its mysteries in a way that allows Haynes to revisit his enthusiasm for animation and modeling, which he hasn’t deployed since his debut “Superstar,” in 1991. Yet I would rather he’d have spelled less of the movie out, even if it meant alienating part of his audience. The expected emotional swells of the story’s convergence points never materialized, at least for me.
And yet the needles “Wonderstruck” threads between art cinema and kid-lit create a patchwork that, in its visionary conception, meets the promise of its title. Haynes has built such an astonishing postmodern mousetrap that it doesn’t matter that its parts don’t always connect.
“Wonderstruck” opens Friday, Nov. 3 at Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Movies of Delray, Cinemark Boynton Beach, the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale and additional theaters in Miami-Dade.
