An impossibly optimistic and sentimental film -- the kind I usually pass right by -- Wonderstruck struck me with wonder and even wrung a few tears from my eye.
An odd sort of coming-of-age historical melodrama, the film follows two children as they approach New York City in different eras. Rose (Millicent Simmonds) comes looking to find her mother (Julianne Moore) a celebrity actress in the late 1920s. Meanwhile, Ben (Oakes Fegley) runs away from his Midwest home looking for his father fifty years later. It's a testament to the strength of the young actors that they carry the movie, especially since they both play deaf children. Millicent Simmonds herself is deaf, and the character Ben has recently become deaf in a bizarre accident.
Implausible as the plot may be, thematically it skillfully ties the two stories into one. Writer Brian Selznick has adapted his own work here, and the film plays out like a love letter to youth, to overcoming obstacles, and to New York City. Much like how Selznick's other work adapted into a major film (Hugo) celebrated the beginning of film itself, this film honors the beauty and mystery that are museums, "cabinets of curios" that help us link time, place, memory, and sentiment. In fact, the film plays out like a sort of mystery in that each scene features explicit and subliminal connections to other scenes, weaving a web of interrelated elements to bind the story into cohesion and coherence.
Carter Burwell's extensive score helps too, as its sweeping musical themes latch its hooks into your heart early on. When paired with the fewer scenes featuring Rose -- shot in pristine black and white -- it feels like a silent film, a choice that, I think, could have been applied to the whole film. Instead, the scenes with Ben are often presented along with audio cues, which serve not to help us identify with Ben but rather understand what's happening around him. It makes his loss more disturbing for us, because we are forced to hear things around him and understand him as being different. In Rose's case, we are fully in her world, and everyone else seems the oddballs.
Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven) continues his trend of impeccably designed and emotionally rich filmmaking, though here he cuts out is usual queer impetus. Rather than focusing on burgeoning sexuality, here he crafts a film about people who are different -- in this case, deaf -- finding family, independence, and beauty in the world around them. By the time the two stories come together at film's end (I won't say how), I felt a little taken advantage of by the film, but it's all so sweet and lovely that I didn't really care.
Sometimes the craftsmanship is so good and the heart is so pure that you can forgive everything else.
IMDb: Wonderstruck
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