A Wrinkle in Time Reviews

In the age of the Harry Potter juggernaut, it's easy to root for a made-for-TV adaptation of a beloved children's fantasy written decades before that genre seized the zeitgeist. But ABC's version of the classic fable A Wrinkle in Time fails in so many ways that it's impossible to rejoice, no matter how wonderful the source material. From cheap, incredibly hokey special effects to tween pandering at the casting call (why is Meg so attractive?) this Disney TV movie has compromise written all over it. To begin with, Susan Shilliday's screenplay spends far too much time establishing the plot's background and protagonist Meg's essential miserableness. By the time the supernatural hijinks kick in, young viewers -- not to mention their adult compatriots -- may well have lost interest. Even worse is the portrayal of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, three beguiling presences in the novel whose translation into the cinematic flesh proves far to fussily eccentric and not nearly magical enough. The final nail in the film's coffin comes in the casting of David Dorfman as Charles Wallace, Meg's frequently mute, yet incomparably brilliant five-year-old brother. Broadcasting his character's abnormalities as if he were auditioning for "Rain Man: The Early Years," Dorfman saps the power from a character who should be engagingly understated. Depressing literalism proves to be the film's overall crippling failure; if the budget doesn't allow for a computer-generated facsimile of magic, the least the filmmakers could do is provide the real thing in the writing.