Adaptations: A Wrinkle in Time

I feel compelled to comment on today's news that A Wrinkle in Time is being prepared for a new film adaptation. I don't talk about it much, but I'm a bit of a Madeleine L'Engle superfan, and though it's being adapted by the screenwriter who brought us Bridge to Terabithia, which made me so rant-y, I'm willing to reserve judgment. (I still haven't seen the Bridge movie - if I come across it someday on cable I'll probably try to give it a go, but I'm not actively seeking it out at present.) With decent studio money and quality computer technology, the range of space worlds that L'Engle presents in Time should be fully realized in all their detail and complexity. In my mind, the film will live or die in casting. The right young actors playing beyond-precocious child prodigy Charles Wallace, supernerd in a BMOC's body Calvin and queen of teen awkwardness Meg could make the movie great, and even elevate subpar scripting. Time will tell.

The part of the news item I find really interesting is the suggestion that Disney views Time and its closest sequels as a potential film franchise. The books that make up the "Time Quartet" - Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet - are connected through their protagonists, members of the Murry nuclear family, but are also fairly disparate works. Even if the film version of A Wrinkle in Time is successful, that doesn't necessarily indicate success for the other three. Wind features the same central trio of characters, but the book's plot, which focuses on an illness of Charles playing out on the mitochondrial level (it really doesn't translate well to concise summary) and utilizes a form of telepathic communication that L'Engle terms "kything," doesn't necessarily seem like it would transfer easily to film. Planet, my favorite of the four, is epic in scope but also features a lot of storytelling that is very interior to its characters. Additionally, Planet takes place about ten years after the events of Time, meaning that the filmmakers' ability to capitalize on any success of Time would be necessarily impacted by either significant passage of time or by recasting of the film's central characters. Finally, Many Waters is just an entirely different book than the other three. Meg and Charles are essentially swapped out for their twin brothers Sandy and Dennys, who accidentally travel through time and space to find themselves caught up in the story of Noah's Ark. In my opinion, Sandy and Dennys are L'Engle's most underdeveloped male characters; when they're introduced in A Wrinkle in Time, the twins are presented as the societal control subjects of the Murry family - the "normal" siblings against whom Meg and Charles are judged - which necessarily makes them kind of blank slates, and they're never given much more shading. It would be an understatement to call it a stretch to view success of the space-tripping adventures of Meg and Charles in Time as any indicator of the potential earnings of their boring brothers stuck in a tale from the Bible.

I could go into why I think the Austins have more cinematic potential than the Murrys, but I'll save any further ranting/cautious optimism for when more information comes out about the movie. Who knows, maybe against all odds and prior experience the people bringing this book to the screen just won't fight what's established it as a classic for nearly five decades. I suppose stranger things have happened.*

*I feel like I should have some perfectly selected classic quote to go here, a la Mrs. Who, but alas, I'm coming up blank.

"I saw eternity the other night / like a great ring of pure and endless light"

I had been thinking for a while about writing something about Owen Wilson and the feeling of nearly losing a creative voice that I love when I heard that Madeleine L'Engle had passed away. Her faith, which came through so strongly in her writing, gives me faith that her soul is somewhere that, if not better, is at least different from here. I couldn't help but shed a few tears though, to know that she has gone and taken her characters and worlds with her. The stories of Meg Murry, Polly O'Keefe and Vicky Austin have all been told, there will be no more.

Like most children, my introduction to L'Engle was through A Wrinkle in Time, which I must have read for the first time sometime in elementary school. I recall reading the Wrinkle quintet and enjoying them, but it wasn't until high school that I started to compulsively collect and read more of her adult books. As a reader, I could tell that she cared deeply about her characters and that their lives didn't stop with the books. My two favorite books of hers, A Severed Wasp and A Live Coal in the Sea, each pick up the story of one of her young heroines, decades after their first appearances. She created complex, intelligent women who were wives and mothers as well as Nobel laureates and world-renowned concert pianists. She raised issues of religion and faith without proselytizing. She wove her stories together, taking characters from one novel to the next and always making their appearance natural. I can't say enough about what her books have meant to me.

Rest in peace, Ms. L'Engle