Synopsis
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
The story of a young boy in the Midwest is told simultaneously with a tale about a young girl in New York from fifty years ago as they both seek the same mysterious connection.
2017 Directed by Todd Haynes
The story of a young boy in the Midwest is told simultaneously with a tale about a young girl in New York from fifty years ago as they both seek the same mysterious connection.
Oakes Fegley Millicent Simmonds Julianne Moore Michelle Williams Cory Michael Smith James Urbaniak Damian Young Patrick Murney Lauren Ridloff Anthony Natale Carole Addabbo Howard Seago Brian Berrebbi John P. McGinty Mark A. Keeton Patrick Wiley Garrett Zuercher Jared Johnston Murphy Guyer Ekaterina Samsonov Sawyer Niehaus Lilianne Rojek Michael W. Gaines Jaden Michael Tom Noonan Morgan Turner Amy Hargreaves Sawyer Nunes Raul Torres Show All…
Kim Jennings Eric Lewis Beauzay Rumiko Ishii Ryan Heck Katya Blumenberg Jeffrey D. McDonald Michael Auszura Erica Hohf
Debra Schutt Nathaniel Davis Dan Decelle Roman Greller Candis Heiland Jim Lillis John M. Souto Joe Taglairino Keith Stiegelbauer
Sem Fôlego, Kutup Yıldızı, La stanza delle meraviglie, 원더스트럭, El Museo de las Maravillas, อัศจรรย์วันข้ามเวลา, Wonderstruck. El museo de las maravillas, Le Musée des merveilles, Мир, полный чудес, 寂静中的惊奇, 奇光下的秘密, Το Δωμάτιο Των Θαυμάτων, Свят измислен, пълен с чудеса, מעשה פלאים, Wonderstruck: O Museu das Maravilhas, Світ, повний чудес, Likę be žado, 童幻逆緣, Après la foudre, ワンダーストラック
Todd Haynes’ films, intellectually rigorous and often profoundly moving, are fractured stories in which alienated, beautiful characters try to find love (or a certain likeness) in the delicate folds of real life. All of this is made possible by a cinema in which aesthetics assume religious force, culture exists on a continuum, and art has a memory.
In other words, don’t be fooled that his latest feature is a hyper-faithful adaptation of a half-illustrated children’s novel by “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” author Brian Selznick — “Wonderstruck” is nothing if not a Todd Haynes movie. And it’s an exquisite one, at that. Fresh off the greatest triumph of his career (that would be “Carol”), Haynes is still operating near the peak of his powers, returning to Cannes with an immaculately crafted fable about the ways in which people of all ages learn to break out of their bodies and connect with the world.
There’s something so undeniably beautiful about this movie. Maybe it’s the way Todd Haynes loves film, and you can feel it in every shot, in every edit, in every line of dialogue. Or maybe it’s the score, carrying the movie in every scene as if it were its own character. Maybe it’s even the kids, who are just that, and make the film seem so child like and wondrous.
But maybe it’s just my brother.
I considered that whenever I first saw this in theaters with my mom. She had to leave in the beginning because the main character Ben reminded her too much of him, but that’s exactly why I stayed. I cried and cried and cried, leaving the…
easily the most beautiful movie I have ever seen, todd haynes resparked my love for the world, film, and all things new york. i’m at a loss for words.
Filled with one totem after another, the same songs sung differently by different people. This movie knows how loss can make you feel like you were unworthy of the thing that's gone. Pretty lovely.
38
I'm happy Todd got this out of his system, because the intent is there, as is the passion and the a-game contributors (Lachman and Burwell are typically exceptional), but Wonderstuck is a colossal misfire, right down to the 'please cry' conclusion. Its material is too adherent to structure, and the film, as a result, is jumbled, lost to scenes which run longer than they should and flat-line the conversation between the two sections. Certainly much to appreciate in terms of performance and Haynes' jagged, pulse-quickening sections of dexterous non-narrative, yet it's constantly running on a treadmill to nowhere, trying to get you all worked up over an unmissable, snore-inducing endgame. Going to be one of those movies where a few poor souls endlessly scream "IT'S UNDERRATED" into a void while the rest of us just keep watching Safe and Carol.
40/100
I was not. But neither was I struck with wonder watching Hugo, so maybe my beef is with Mr. Selznick and his laborious clockwork narratives (as cinematic source material, that is; they may well work wonderfully on the page). Hugo, at least, wasn't burdened by an expressly literary conceit that proves insanely cumbersome onscreen; you could trim this two-hour film down to 90 or so minutes just by removing all of the many, many instances in which someone speaks to the 1977 kid and he of course says "What?" and then we watch the person write the words down on a notepad, usually while muttering them aloud, and then Haynes still often shows the notepad as the person holds…
That girl gave up everything she had to see Julianne Moore perform live.... boy if that ain't me...
Lovely handling of period, clumsy and cumbersome handling of narrative.
I feel like to say any more would take away from the charm of it so here's all I'll say for now: Wonderstruck is completely magical.
I'll stick my neck out and say that I thoroughly loved Hugo when it came out; Scorsese took the simplistic nostalgia and mythologized film history of Selznick's text and upped the ante with an aesthetic approach that matched its not-really-a-throwback style, using 3D both as a nod to film's long history of tacky gimmickry and as one of the bolder experiments of the modern 3D era.
Haynes, however, approaches Selznick with an unwieldy amalgam of his early post-structuralism and his more recent, florid presitge work, and he cannot reconcile the two. The bifurcated story of two deaf children is tediously sappy, and their complete lack of relation to each other (until a hideous plot reconciliation toward the end) means that…
I'm pretty sure I would have liked this under any circumstances as it's beautifully structured and scored. But my experience was definitely colored by the fact that my 9 and 6-year-old fell hard for this thing. Maybe because it was just the right combination of straightforward and stylized they were able to stay with the narrative while having their minds gently blown by Haynes' playful experimentalism. They were also just incredibly moved by it - as was I.