Canto One – A Secret Meeting Awaits
Valerie was on her skateboard on Main Street. She was thrashing. It didn’t matter how dangerous Daddy said it could be. She was a thrasher, and she knew how to ride. If he thought he could forbid her from doing it, well, that was just so boofoo! No. She couldn’t use that word. Not after Danny Murphy told her what it actually meant. Yeesh! Okay, un-cool, then.
She was ten. She was wearing her latex biker shorts. You know, the ones Mom forbid her to wear because they were skin tight. But why did it matter so much? It was not like she actually had a butt to show off. She could ride her skateboard naked and no one would really notice. She did an ollie off the edge of the sidewalk and onto the hot pavement. Summer was ending, but the last day of the Labor Day weekend was still hot. Iowa hot. Eighty degrees in the sun with warm, humid air that boiled you right out of your biker shorts sort of hot. But Valerie wasn’t ready to find out if it was true that no one would notice. She needed to keep them on. They were black with a purple slash of color on the sides. Her favorite thing to wear.
Across the asphalt street her wheels and trucks buzzed as she rode to the south side of Main Street. It was a small Iowa farm town. Only maybe four cars were parked there at any one time, and no one was on the street but her. Still, she wished she could burn her way across right in front of someone’s moving pickup truck and scare them into dropping a bale of hay or two. No one marked her passing by in one of the most boring places in the whole Mr. Boofoo Universe. No. The Mr. Un-Cool Universe. She had to remember not to say that other thing anymore. Especially in front of Mom, even if Mom didn’t have a clue what it really meant.
She was headed for the Ghost House on the south eastern edge of town. The Ghost House was the only remaining haunted house in Norwall, Iowa, and it had collapsed in on itself. It was more a pile of broken boards and garbage than a house, but it was the place where she was headed because, unknown to most of the adults in town, the Ghost House still had a functioning cellar, shored up with railroad ties by her cousin Brent Clarke and the rest of the original Norwall Pirates. The Pirates had been a secret club in the 1970’s, a secret that nearly everyone knew at least one thing about. They had been a liars’ club of young boys who supposedly caught a werewolf once and chased an undead Chinese wizard around town. Liars’ club was more than just a local nickname for it. It was more of a literal definition. But she had been called to attend a secret Pirate meeting. A meeting that shouldn’t exist because there had been no Norwall Pirates since they had graduated high school in 1978.
Mom would have a fit if she knew Valerie was headed to the Ghost House. It was the kind of run-down rattle-trap that all mothers worried about. No decent mother worthy of her official Mom-card would stand for a child of theirs going to such a place, especially not Val’s Mom, the Queen of Worrywarts.
She thrashed her way down Whitten Avenue and then around the corner, zigzagging for two blocks, and then passing Ugly Bill’s Junkyard to the huge pile of broken crap that had been described to her as being the actual place.
She came to a stop, kicked up her board and grabbed it, and looked around, not quite as certain now as she pondered a wilderness of junk, thistles, and burdock leaves. Ugly Bill Pixeley had tons of used car parts and wrecked truck parts from which he salvaged the pieces that he, his brother, and his two idiot sons put together as trucks and other vehicles which he then sold at a huge profit. Pixeley was a talented mechanic and a very crafty self-taught engineer.
“You here for the Pirate meeting?” asked Danny Murphy, pulling up on his bicycle.
“Yeah,” she answered, popping her Bazooka Joe bubble gum. “Mary Philips says it ain’t just gonna be for boys anymore.”
“Yeah. I heard that too. And I’m glad you’re gonna be a Pirate,” Danny said with a sly grin. He was a sophisticated man of twelve… well, not really… but he was a boy older than Valerie by an entire school year, though only about five months in age. Older boys being in the club was one of the main attractions for her. “It will be cool to have the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall in our club.”
Valerie blushed and dropped her eyes a little bit at that. Her Uncle Dash had always said that about her since she could remember. But it was one thing to hear it from family, and something else to hear it from somebody she rode the school bus with. Some things get around by word of mouth a lot faster and farther than you ever wish they would.
“Do you know how to get inside?” Valerie asked.
“I can show you a secret entrance … for a kiss?” Danny blushed intensely as he proposed the bargain, a truly dark red that can only be achieved by somebody as boney-skinny, white-skinned Irish, and shy of girls as Danny Murphy was.
“Boys who think like that all grow up to be rapists,” Val shot back at him. “That’s what my Aunt Jennifer says, anyway.”
Danny turned an even darker shade of red-violet. Valerie was suddenly feeling guilty, as if she might possibly have caused his head to explode from embarrassment by her cutting remark about his personal urges. She didn’t dislike him. She just didn’t want to kiss him.
“Aw, I didn’t mean anything by that. I’ll show you the Tunnel of Doom.”
Danny pointed to a large concrete drainage tile that had been rolled up against the side of the Ghost House’s foundation. She could see that if you crawled through the tile, you could enter through a large crack in the brick foundation. Spiders and potentially snakes to crawl through. Ughh! But Valerie was no Shrinking Violet. She pushed Danny out of the way and went in.
Only One Star?
There are certain books that simply have to exist in order for me to be me. I couldn’t be the person I am without The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. These are all books that have an allegorical element, a trans-formative effect, that shapes how you think and how you live after reading them. Some of these books have not been made into a movie. Some probably still can’t be. Others have not been made into an effective movie. But, then, Disney in 2018 makes a movie version of A Wrinkle in Time that makes me relive the primary experience of the book all over again.
I was disappointed to see the critics being harsh about the movie. I had high hopes before going to see it. Yet, you couldn’t miss the one star rating on the box office rating system of the ticket and show time site I was using. But my daughter and I went to see it yesterday anyway. It was far above my highest expectations.
You see, the novel itself is magical. The essential characters of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which have to be witch-like, super-real incarnations of inter-dimensional beings. It is the view of them with open-minded childlike eyes that makes the complex relationships of this story to reality apparent to anyone who thinks clearly like a child. It is the reason why this book is a young adult novel, written primarily for children, even though the concept of a tesseract is wholly mind-bending in a Stephen Hawking sort of way. It is the wonder with which the director of this movie lensed the dimension-tessering time witches that makes this movie the best version. Not like that failed attempt in 2003. That was almost there, but not quite by half.
Critics don’t like some of the special effects and the color schemes of some scenes. Many things about the final battle with evil are seen by them as inexplicably bizarre. They don’t like the over-use of extreme close-ups on the faces of characters. And they think the performances of some of the child actors are too wooden and unreal to carry off the story.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
This is a story that takes place in the heads of the people involved, including the viewer of the movie. The extreme close-ups pull you into the personal feelings and struggles of the main characters. Particularly Storm Reid as Meg. The story is about her struggle as an adolescent to be at peace with her own flaws and self-image while at the same time being responsible for finding and saving her father, as he has completely lost his way on his quest to “shake hands with the universe”. Meg undergoes a challenge to her self image as she is cruelly bullied by another girl in school. She has to come to terms with loving her super-genius little brother Charles Wallace. And she has to weather the changes that occur when she encounters a potential first love in Calvin. It is a coming of age story that really smart kids can relate to directly from their own personal experience.
This one-star movie with only a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a far better movie than the critics would have you believe. It is doing quite well at the box office. Kids seem to love it. And in my wacky opinion, it is the best movie version of the book to date. I love this movie.
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Filed under art criticism, commentary, magic, movie review, science fiction
Tagged as A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, movie review