“In just two adaptations,” begins Benedict Seal at Vague Visages, “author Brian Selznick has developed a reputation for inspiring intelligent and magical children’s films. After John Logan adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Hugo, Selznick has been upgraded to screenwriter to adapt his own novel for Todd Haynes’s lovely Carol follow-up, Wonderstruck,” which “takes on New York in two gorgeously realized time periods. In 1977, Ben (Oakes Fegley) is living with his aunt after losing his mother. When a freak accident leaves him deaf, he journeys to New York City in search of his absent father. In 1927, Rose (Millicent Simmonds) has lived with deafness her whole life and travels to the Big Apple when she discovers that her favorite actress (Julianne Moore) is performing on Broadway.”
“A sculptor of beautiful and strange objects that fit into very particular corners and crevices of history, Haynes was born to make a movie about historical curation,” writes Michael Koresky in Film Comment. “Haynes’s geographical and temporal settings are never circumstantial; they’re everything. His Safe (1995) and television miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) aren’t merely set, respectively, in ’80s and ’30s Los Angeles—each excavates its own time and place, with a remarkable attention to physical detail and an intellectual fascination with what those times and places mean retrospectively, in the crawl of history. Now imagine those two films cut together to prompt a dialogue between their two eras and you might have something like the experience of Wonderstruck.” Koresky also has a good long talk with Haynes, cinematographer Ed Lachman, and production designer Mark Friedberg.
Wonderstruck “jumps styles—not just in Haynes’s camerawork and editing, which hop between silent-era expressionism and handheld Seventies grit, but also in Carter Burwell’s city symphony–like score, which seems to borrow from the whole history of twentieth-century music,” writes Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Like its characters, the movie feels like it’s constantly searching—for an emotional resolution, for answers to its narrative mysteries, for a style to call its own. . . . By the end, I felt like I was watching not just a coming-of-age tale based on a children’s book, but an intimate, staggering apologia for the director’s whole eclectic career.”
“For all of Haynes’s visual splendor—and this movie has plenty—he can’t find an efficient way to dramatize this story,” finds Jesse Hassenger in Brooklyn Magazine. “Though the kids are pretty good, they’re stuck in a story taking blind faith in Selznick’s belief that there’s nothing more exciting than kids exploring carefully curated rooms. Hugo achieved the desired wonder through sheer will of Scorsese’s virtuosic 3D filmmaking. That never happens here, though the movie makes a play for it in its interminable final stretch.”
“I wanted to feel like I could create something with as much love and attention to detail and history and character as I’ve given to my adult dramas, but something that kids could be able to experience,” Haynes tells Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. And Variety’s Kristopher Tapley interviews Lachman.
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Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.
Meantime, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York is staging a series running from October 13 through 22, Inspiring Wonderstruck. “On the opening weekend, the Museum will present a preview screening of Wonderstruck with Selznick, Friedberg, and costume designer Sandy Powell in person, followed by a book signing with Selznick.”
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