I did it! I completed the Wonder quad-fecta of 2017. I saw Wonder Woman, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Wonder, and now Wonderstruck. I deserve a sticker for that or something. They all turned out to be pretty decent movies too. I wanted to see Wonderstruck in theaters (it's the only of the four that I didn't) but it disappeared where I live way too quickly and never had a great theater count.
Correction: I forgot about Wonder Wheel from 2017. Dammit.
I am happy I saw it at home for one reason though. I had the subtitles turned on by mistake and was too lazy to turn them off. Throughout the movie, during Rose's scenes, I enjoyed how the captions would periodically say "(No sound)" to let anyone deaf watching know that they weren't missing out on anything. I don't know why I found this so funny. I just imagine a scenario where they are testing the subtitles with a deaf person and the deaf person keeps coming back saying he thinks the subtitles are missing things. And how did they determine exactly when to do it? Did they just mark every time a deaf person asked them if the subtitles were missing something? I'm having too much fun with this.
I can't say I'm surprised that Wonderstruck bombed in theaters and with end of the year awards. If Carol couldn't get sufficient Oscar love* for Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck didn't stand a chance. Wonderstruck was pitched as a children's film, which it is. I think it might be in the vein of Where the Wild Things Are: a children's film most appreciated by adults. Haynes gets caught up in the artistic flourishes a bit too much. I'm not sure how one is supposed to sell this movie. Half of it is silent. A lot of it is based on museum exhibits. There's a lot of loss in the film. I'm not sure I see anything in it that would make a nine-year-old look back nostalgically at it. It exists entirely to excite parents with the idea that not every movie they see with their kids has to have a Minion in it.
*Anything short of a Best Picture nomination for that is not enough.
Wonderstuck is a nice little meditation of a movie. Between this, A Ghost Story, and Dunkirk, 2017 was a great year for mood piece movies. Similar to Hugo, a movie I do love, I get the feeling that the payoff to how everything is connected is a lot more profound in the book. The two stories in Wonderstruck are assembled a little clunkily. The way they were connected wasn't much of a surprise. I was hoping for something a little less predictable. A lot of the movie was in service to the visuals, so in that respect, it was a success.
I will say, I think this was an issue with my TV or the specific cut I saw, but this movie sure was dark. I had a hard time seeing a number of scenes.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
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