“Todd Haynes’s films, intellectually rigorous and often profoundly moving, are fractured stories in which alienated, beautiful characters try to find love (or a certain likeness) in the delicate folds of real life,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “All of this is made possible by a cinema in which aesthetics assume religious force, culture exists on a continuum, and art has a memory. In other words, don’t be fooled that his latest feature is a hyper-faithful adaptation of a half-illustrated children’s novel by The Invention of Hugo Cabret author Brian Selznick—Wonderstruck is nothing if not a Todd Haynes movie. And it’s an exquisite one, at that. Fresh off the greatest triumph of his career (that would be Carol), Haynes is still operating near the peak of his powers, returning to Cannes with an immaculately crafted fable about the ways in which people of all ages learn to break out of their bodies and connect with the world.”
At the Playlist, Jessica Kiang gives Wonderstruck a B+ and sets it up for us: “The main thread of the story follows Ben (Oakes Fegley), a little boy living in the evocatively named Gunflint, Minnesota [in 1977] with his aunt’s family, after his mother (Michelle Williams, in a sliver of a role of which we wish we had more) is killed in a car crash. She had promised to reveal to him the identity of his father ‘when the time is right,’ but died before that time ever came, and the grieving Ben, after he suffers an accident that takes his hearing, runs away to New York City to pursue a clue he’s found about the man’s identity. In parallel, in black and white and entirely without voiced dialogue, we watch the seemingly unrelated but cosmically symmetrical 50-years-earlier story of Rose (appealing newcomer Millicent Simmonds), a young deaf Hoboken girl who also runs away to Manhattan to find a glamorous actress played, in the first of two small but pivotal roles, by Julianne Moore.”
Writing for Screen, Wendy Ide notes that “a semi-animated sequence which fills in the links between the two stories is an achingly potent climax to this idiosyncratic charmer of a film.”
“Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship,” grants Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.”
“Haynes has always been a ravishing visual storyteller,” writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, “and his seventh feature is as seductively crafted as anything he’s made, with exquisite contributions from invaluable frequent collaborators including cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Mark Friedberg and costumer Sandy Powell. Perhaps even more notable here is the work of composer Carter Burwell, who has created distinct musical moods for the narrative’s parallel threads. . . Affonso Goncalves’s liquid editing gracefully eases back and forth between the dual stories, providing charming juxtapositions.”
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds that “Wonderstruck’s contrivances are gooey and its self-conscious elaborations and withheld mysteries, finally revealed in a narrative voiceover, demand an unearned awe at the supposed cosmic coincidences of essentially benevolent fate—and they incidentally rely heavily on the idea of a child suppressing a certain memory, with no very convincing reason for having done so.”
“It ends up as a sweet-enough movie, and one that’s full of joy and invention,” writes Time Out’s Dave Calhoun, “but also one that feels like a lot of effort has been put into serving a tale that maybe doesn’t fully deserve it.”
Similarly, Richard Lawson for Vanity Fair: “The film is a mighty thing to behold, offering up a lush visual and aural landscape that is frequently breathtaking. So why did I leave the theater so unmoved?”
For the Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Kilday talks with Haynes “about making a movie for Amazon, working with child actors and forswearing dialogue,” while at Sloan Science & Film, Sonia Shechet Epstein interviews Selznick.
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