'A Wrinkle in Time' Review: Disney Trips on a Tesseract

March 8, 2018 12:46 p.m. ET

The source material has always presented challenges, maybe insuperable ones; a 2003 TV adaptation was a botch. Since its publication in 1962, L’Engle’s book has been cherished by generations of young readers, but not for its tidiness. Travel across time and space simply happens—the only gesture toward an explanation is that something called a tesseract does the trick. The endearing heroine, in her early teens and convinced that she’s an ugly duckling, gets help on her quest from a trio of shape-shifting celestial guides. The free-form narrative goes pinballing around such diverse areas as particle physics, Christian myth (those guides weren’t assigned to the trip by a commercial tour operator) and the perils of conformity.

The core concern, though, is Meg’s gradual discovery of her selfhood—of her beautiful and singular self. The book pulls readers along with unflagging energy, vivid imagery and a steadfast delight in Meg and her little brother, Charles Wallace (played here by

Deric McCabe

), both of them prodigies of intelligence and passion who become fighters against the galactic forces of darkness.

The movie lowers the kids’ IQs, though they’re still bright and articulate, and raises the cosmic stakes with heedless grandiosity. It isn’t enough for Meg to be female and brave; she’s exhorted to be a warrior (a word that doesn’t appear in the book) by

Oprah Winfrey’s

Mrs. Which, a lavishly bedizened and solemn apparition who hovers above the ground like a float in a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. (Her cohorts, Mrs. Who and

Mrs. Whatsit,

are played, respectively, by

Mindy Kaling

and

Reese Witherspoon.

Only Ms. Witherspoon manages to have any fun in her role, though precious little.)

Nor is it enough for Meg to feel loved for who she is, and worthy of love for what she manages to achieve. She is assured of love, showered with love in the hallowed tradition of the self-esteem movement. “Love is always there for you, even if you don’t feel it,” says her physicist father, who’s played by

Chris Pine,

in a flashback to the family’s life before he disappeared. Rather than trust the material’s power to teach by example, the film dispenses extended-release doses of standard Disney nostrums—the primacy of family, the centrality of praise. In a teaching mode of its own, the script, by

Jennifer Lee

and

Jeff Stockwell,

offers an early, and clankingly clinical, explanation of Meg’s behavior when her school principal says “You can’t keep using your father’s disappearance as an excuse to act out.” As for the dangers of conformity, they’re dealt with glancingly in a couple of sequences that are photographed prettily—clone-like kids bouncing their balls in unison—but not developed dramatically.

From the evidence on screen, Ms. DuVernay and her colleagues lacked an original vision for the film. They devoted themselves to illustrating the book—sometimes strikingly, sometimes with music-video flourishes—yet never found its emotional essence, or the intimacy and spontaneity to convey it. Storm Reid is appealing as the heroine, who is biracial in this version, but limited by a role that often makes Meg a passive spectator to exterior events. (In “The Wizard of Oz,” to which “A Wrinkle In Time” bears many resemblances,

Judy Garland

was a phenomenon for the ages, not just a young star, yet she couldn’t have done what she did without the ardent, dynamic writing that’s absent here.)

Deric McCabe, who’s younger still, is charming as the supernaturally precocious Charles Wallace, but he struggles to recite his intricate lines.

Levi Miller

makes a blandly attractive Calvin, the older boy who accompanies Meg and Charles on their journey. (On two occasions Calvin tells Meg he likes her hair, but his character is so undeveloped that we don’t know what he’s talking about when he remarks, toward the end, that he can finally say certain things he has needed to say to his dad.)

Zach Galifianakis

brings flashes of comic energy to the fragmentary role of Happy Medium. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is quietly impressive as Meg’s mother; her performance is at once graceful and solidly grounded. But Mr. Pine is stuck with highfalutin pomposities as Meg’s dad. At one point we see him rattling on about the wonders of science like some AI simulacrum of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Toward the end he tells Meg, “I wanted to shake hands with the universe, but I should have been holding yours,” and you wonder how any scientist, however bold, would extend such a far-reaching handshake.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com