A wrinkle in translation

Two years after it was first scheduled to air as a four-hour miniseries, “A Wrinkle in Time” -- based on Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel about three children and a trio of otherworldly spirits (Alfre Woodward, Kate Nelligan and Alison Elliott) traveling the cosmos in a fight against universal evil -- arrives on ABC tonight as a three-hour TV movie under the aegis of “The Wonderful World of Disney.” It would still be better viewed in two parts, by tape or TiVo, if for no other reason than that it runs until 11 p.m. on a school night. But even shorn of an hour -- into which some helpful bits of information and action have clearly disappeared -- it is a long trip, and not made for a single sitting.

The length of its detention on the network shelf certainly isn’t a matter of mere quality; ABC (and not ABC alone, of course) runs lesser work every day. (It isn’t quality that decides these things but numbers). If neither the deepest nor the most dazzling kids’ film ever made, “A Wrinkle in Time” is, on its own terms, intelligent, engaging and well-played; its failures are mostly ones of translation and comparison. It is not as good as the book, in other words, a work to which the term “beloved” is almost routinely attached.

It lacks the original’s economy, its whimsy and, for better or worse, its spiritual purpose. Complex inner life is rendered in movie shorthand, and strange or impossible things that sit easily on the page, where they work on the mind’s eye, fall flat when made concrete -- the flying centaurs of Uriel, for instance, which just look like bad computer animation. “I expected it to be bad,” L’Engle recently told Newsweek, “and it is.” But it is not that bad.

Some of the alterations from the text are useful, even necessary. (Whether it was necessary to turn the book into a movie in the first place -- after 40 years -- is another question.) L’Engle’s dialogue shows its age, and it was not written in any case to be said aloud. (The new dialogue, by Susan Shilliday, who wrote the screenplay for “Legends of the Fall,” is a little corny at times but in a familiar way.) And although the book reflects its Cold War origins -- in its tone of apocalyptic dread, and in the particulars of the dark planet Camazotz, whose capital city mixes the blankness of Soviet monumentalism and American suburbia in a particularly creepy way -- updating it to the present does no serious harm: The book is updated in the head of every child who reads it, after all, and L’Engle was ultimately writing for the ages.

Meg Murry (Katie Stuart), the young misfit at the center of the story, has been relieved of her glasses and her braces to make her more conventionally acceptable as a lead. This is not fatal, since she’s supposed to be prettier than she thinks she is, and we are given to understand that her feelings of worthlessness and weirdness are self-created. Stuart does a good job at externalizing alienation.

The film does veer a little too far from its model toward the end, as Meg and her psychic little brother, Charles Wallace (David Dorfman), along with friend Calvin (Gregory Smith), arrive on Camazotz to rescue their father. (How he got there, well, it’s a long story.) At this point, subtlety is traded for spectacle -- shaking walls, splitting floors, a giant, undulating brain-thing. Where L’Engle’s Camazotz is a planet whose resemblance to our own makes its evilness all the more unsettling, here it looks like Mordor subdivided for tract homes, with dark, lowering clouds and an air of endless night. (Indeed, the screen-filling red eye of “Homicide’s” Kyle Secor -- who plays the public face of IT, the disembodied brain that controls Camazotz -- will remind many of a certain Dark Lord of recent filmdom.)

The sets and costumes have been tricked out with the more conventional symbols of evil -- the Wicked Witch of the West would feel quite at home. (There are a few other “Wizard of Oz” moments in the film, most notably Elliott’s Glinda impersonation as Mrs. Who.) And Hollywood logic requires that Meg not merely free her brother from the clutches of IT, as she does in the book, but that she also slay the monster and save the planet. To keep things triumphantly tidy.

Finally, it must be said that any film Woodard plays in is automatically 47% more worth watching, and this is no exception.

*

‘A Wrinkle

in Time’

Where: ABC

When: 8 to 11 tonight

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children)

Katie Stuart...Meg Murry

David Dorfman...Charles Wallace Murry

Gregory Smith...Calvin O’Keefe

Alfre Woodard...Mrs. Whatsit

Kate Nelligan...Mrs. Which

Alison Elliott...Mrs. Who

Sean Cullen...The Happy Medium

Kyle Secor...Hank

Executive producers Josanne B. Lovick, Jay Firestone, Adam Haight, Patricia Rozema, Catherine Hand-O’Dell and Jordan Kerner. Director John Kent Harrison. Writer Susan Shilliday, from the book by Madeleine L’Engle.