Wild Nights are My Glory!

(This film is not.)

“Have you seen the Wrinkle in Time movie yet?” my friend texted. “I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

That’s a good way to put it. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

I was one of those girls who adored the book. I loved it because Meg was messy and smart and complicated and not popular. I loved it because the kids in town thought she was weird, and because her family was made up of nice people, and because they all used big words and read books and you just knew that their house wasn’t perfect (what with their mother cooking stew on the bunsen burner in the lab). I loved it because Meg got in trouble in school for being too intelligent and messy and not working up to her potential, and for being a smart-ass. I loved it because Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit were messy and complicated and brilliant and quoted creative geniuses. And they were powerful. And they were women. And because the heroine saves herself and the men in her life. And because Meg and Calvin quoted Shakespeare and Jefferson to fight the darkness. And because Meg’s stubbornness, impatience, and uniqueness turned out to be her greatest gifts. And because conformity was evil and an inherent side effect of the darkness overtaking the universe.

That’s why I loved it. That’s why I reread it every year for decades. That’s why I named my son Murry. (He was damned lucky he didn’t turn out with the name Charles Wallace.)

But I loved more than that. I loved the whole L’Engle oeuvre. Some books were better than others. I loved the one about Noah’s Ark (there were Seraphim, yo!), and the ones about Meg and Calvin’s daughter, Poly. I loved Cannon Tallis, and if you are a certain age, “A Ring of Endless Light” is spectacular. (Although, I suspect, that is an age that I will never be again. But I remember reading it and being STUNNED.) I loved the (what I now know to be very unrealistic) image of family holding hands and singing classical music. (Very Maria von Trapp.) Her whole Kairos vs Chronos Christian/literary mysticism thing knocked me out, back in the day. I loved it that L’Engle had an office at St. John the Divine, and that schools banned her books, but the Christian bookstores carried them. I even loved her when the New Yorker article came out that gave us the inside scoop on her family secrets and scandals.

And on windy nights, I always announced with exhilaration that, “Wild Nights are my Glory!”

I still do.

The last book L’Engle was working on was about Meg Murry in middle age. I so wanted to find out what was up with Meg in middle age, because I was middle aged now. Were wild nights still as important to her as they are to me? I wanted to know. But L’Engle died, so I don’t think we will ever know.

So, about the movie. Oprah was spectacular. (“Is there a wrong size?”) The kid who played Meg did a fine job, but she was a bit too attractive. The kid who played Calvin was not only too good looking but too ineffectual. (My husband said to me, “Did he do more than that in the book? Looked like his only role in the movie was to boost Meg’s ego.”).

The special effects were dazzling (talking to flowers and. Mrs. Whatsit turning into whatever in the hell that thing she turns into is.) Many additions to the story were very good. Showing jealousy, body conformity, fear, depression, despair all feeding into darkness and evil was done well. The house where the Mrs. Which, Who, and Whatsit were living had a lovely Molly Weasley-quasi-intellectual comfort feel to it that all book-lovers can appreciate. And the kid who played Charles Wallace was excellent. And the updated Mrs. Who quotes were a good touch.

But Sandy and Dennys weren’t there. (So I guess that *Many Waters* is out for a sequel?) And the scene with the children bouncing balls in unison on the side walk made no sense unless you had read the book (and even if you had, it kind of turned into a weird *Inception/Dark City* type thing that made no sense). And, yes, they tried to explain that artists and scientists and creative people fight the darkness, but they edited out the whole anti-conformity sub-theme, which was originally about the perceived perils of Communism in 1962. Today it could just as easily be about people who fear change and people who are different. And about hegenomic privilege.

In this version, Meg doesn’t live on the edge of the woods and suffer through scary, exhilarating storms in the attic of a rambling old farmhouse. Instead, she lives in a sunny California housing development. With palm trees. (Seriously? Palm trees?) In this versions, for inexplicable reasons, Charles Wallace is adopted (what difference does it make?) In this version Meg’s impatience and ability to shout out well-written texts and irrational square roots and avoid the insidious conformity that seeks to squelch freedom of expression and creativity, doesn’t happen. There is a brief mention of warriors of the light, but no actual example of how said warriors can work.

In the book Meg’s faults, her impatience, her impulsiveness, and her rebelliousness are the things that get her in trouble in junior high, but are the things that ultimately her save her family. And when I was 12, and constantly being told by my friends, and teachers that my impatience, impulsiveness, non-conformity, and rebelliousness were qualities were personality flaws, it was such a relief to see that those faults might someday become useful. (I never colored in the lines, and I seriously doubted that Meg Murry ever did, either.)

And, though I have never been called upon to use these “faults” when visiting a distant planet, they have certainly helped me make a good living and lead this imaginative, fulfilling life that I live.

The conformists of my youth are presumably still somewhere bouncing a ball in perfect rhythm. Have fun with that, I guess.

So that’s why, even though I hope that this film will somehow be a gateway drug for little girls to love themselves and avoid the darkness, it lost me. Wild nights will always be my glory, but this film won’t.

Who knows? Maybe it will turn into a classic. *The Wizard of Oz* wasn’t terribly popular when it came out, and I don’t even think it was a great film. It’s current popularity has more to do with it being shown yearly on television as an annual event than anything that happened in 1939. And if it does, maybe it will help fight the dark.

Lord knows, the light needs all the help it can get these days.