Wonderstruck
Todd Haynes (2017)
A few minutes into Wonderstruck, young Ben (Oakes Fegley) pleads with his mother Elaine to tell him who his father was. ‘Was he an astronaut?’ asks Ben, ‘is that why I’m fascinated by the stars and space travel?’ The following conversation between them makes clear that Ben has asked the question before and that Elaine has always fobbed him off, as she does now, by saying it isn’t the right time. Since today is Ben’s twelfth birthday he’s understandably baffled and frustrated by his mother’s continuing reticence. What’s more, this was his last chance to break it. The birthday scene is a flashback: Elaine has recently died in a car crash and orphan Ben is now living with another family. (It’s all the more regrettable that Elaine vanishes from the picture so soon because she’s played by Michelle Williams.) We never find out more about her personality or why she was so secretive about Ben’s father. We can only assume she didn’t want to give the film’s ending away.
These early sequences take place in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in 1977. Then black-and-white replaces colour and Todd Haynes puts up a new signpost – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1927. Rose (Millicent Simmonds), about the same age as Ben, lives with her cold, cruel father (James Urbaniak). There’s no sign of her mother. Rose is very unhappy: beside a lake, she writes ‘Help me’ on a piece of paper, which she folds into a yacht and sends onto the water. She takes refuge from her grim home life in a cinema, absorbed by tear-jerking silent melodramas starring Lillian Mayhew. (The Gishy connections extend beyond a shared first name: the movie currently playing is called ‘Daughter of the Storm’.) When Rose reads in a magazine that Lillian (Julianne Moore) is appearing in a Broadway play, she resolves to seek her out in New York. Ben, meanwhile, has found a marker in one of his mother’s books, on which a message to her is inscribed and signed, Ben feels sure, by his father. The marker bears the address of Kincaid’s, a Manhattan bookshop. Ben embarks on a much longer journey to the same destination as Rose.
For the next hour or so, the narrative moves between the two children’s experiences in New York, accumulating points of similarity between them. Rose is congenitally deaf; Ben, in the time between Elaine’s death and his departure for the Big Apple, loses his hearing, thanks to a freak accident during an electrical storm. Ben’s on a quest for his father. Rose, it’s soon revealed, is mad about Lillian Mayhew because she’s actually her mother. (When Rose arrives to interrupt her play rehearsal, Lillian falls well short of the maternal devotion that seems to be her speciality on screen.) Both children make their way to the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, where they touch a meteorite, Ben makes friends with another boy (Jaden Michael) and Rose finds her kindly elder brother Walter (Cory Michael Smith, who, as in his small part in Carol, is engagingly animated). But although the twin stories rhyme they don’t ramify or deepen. You just sit waiting for the connection between the children to be explained and so it is eventually – and unsurprisingly. The proprietor of Kincaid’s bookshop in 1977 is the elderly Walter (Tom Noonan). Rose is Ben’s grandmother. His mystery father was her son, who died young of a heart condition. In the course of the half-century between her childhood and Ben’s, Rose has become the spitting image of her mother: unlike Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore is in the film for more than a cameo.
Wonderstruck has a screenplay by Brian Selznick, adapted from his own 2011 young adult novel. (Selznick also wrote the book on which Martin Scorsese’s Hugo was based.) The screenplay eschews voiceover. With two deaf protagonists, Todd Haynes may have liked the idea of extending the silent movie aspect beyond ‘Daughter of the Storm’ – there’s barely any dialogue for a long stretch of the film. This puts a lot of responsibility, however, on Haynes’s two young leads and on Carter Burwell’s score. The Rose sequences work better than the Ben ones because the silence is more thoroughgoing (Rose is deaf and mute, Ben can’t hear but can speak) and because Millicent Simmonds (who‘s herself deaf) is more appealing and expressive than Oakes Fegley. You seem to see in her features the lineaments of a much older woman’s face. Julianne Moore is eloquent as the older Rose – her signing has something of the urgency that Sally Hawkins brought to The Shape of Water. Yet it’s disappointing that Millicent Simmonds’s unusual looks turn into a face as familiar as Moore’s.
Carter Burwell’s music is pleasant but, since there’s a lot of it, a bit tedious – which is a fair description of Wonderstruck as a whole. The soundtrack also includes ‘Space Oddity’ and Deodato’s arrangement of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ aka 2001 though it turns out Ben’s father wasn’t an astronaut. All too aptly for this film, he was a designer – a talent inherited from Rose, who graduated from paper yachts to an amazingly detailed miniature model of New York City, which she hand-made for the World’s Fair there in 1964. Admirers of the film have found much more in it than this viewer was able to. David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, for example, experienced ‘an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory’. For me, Selznick’s story shares Hugo‘s self-conscious magic-of-childhood quality and Todd Haynes’s ambitions don’t seem to extend beyond wrapping it up neatly and tying it with ribbon. He shows more curiosity in objects – books, museum objects, dioramas – than people. Ben’s sudden loss of hearing means he hasn’t had time to learn sign language. This necessitates plenty of handwritten notes. Rather than adding suspense to Wonderstruck, they slow things up.
11 April 2018