Before long, her little-girl-in-the-big-city adventure reveals why, exactly, she’s lonely, and why she feels so drawn to Lillian Mayhew. The effect, at once beguiling and melancholy, is to place the audience right inside the experience of Rose’s deafness.
Griffith), which he stages with windblown authenticity - and, in fact, the whole 1927 section of “Wonderstruck” is designed to be a kind of stylized silent movie, like “The Artist.” It’s shot in pristine storybook black-and-white, with no spoken dialogue and occasional shots of written notes that act as intertitles. Haynes shows us a snippet of the silent (very Lillian Gish and D.W. We’ve already seen her go to the cinema to watch a silent film called “Daughter of the Storm,” featuring Lillian Mayhew ( Julianne Moore), a fabled Hollywood star Rose moons over like an obsessive fan. She’s lonely and deaf, and she runs away from her family’s mansion in Hoboken, N.J., to seek some sort of redemption amid the glittering lights and stone towers of New York City. In 1927, we meet Rose (Millicent Simmonds), a 12-year-old urchin with a sweetly quizzical, catlike face. “Wonderstruck,” with its tale of two lost and impaired children finding each other across time, will certainly be an awards contender, and it may gently push the buttons of more than a few moviegoers, but it’s an ambitious doohickey impersonating a work of art.įor a while it plays like two movies in one, and Haynes is so on his game in staging each of them that the audience gets swept right up in the bittersweet mixed-media rapture of his filmmaking. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.
Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. “Wonderstruck” is a supple and flowing experience by comparison. The film is based on an illustrated children’s novel by Brian Selznick, who wrote and drew “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which served as the basis for Martin Scorsese’s widely praised but - to me, at least - frenetic and overwrought gimcrack fantasy “Hugo” (2011).
We’re watching a visionary humanist apply his luminous voice to a piece of emotional Tinkertoy. Todd Haynes is a transcendent filmmaker, one who can haunt your imagination and carry you away, but in “ Wonderstruck,” there’s more artistry in his storytelling than there is in the intricate mechanical story he’s telling.
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