When I’m watching a film by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, I’m Not There), I’m usually too caught up in the director’s formal decisions to think about the emotions of the characters. The deeper engagement comes later, after the movie has sunk in and I can separate the aesthetic from the themes. So it goes with Haynes’s latest, Wonderstruck, which opened in Chicago last Friday. Like his debut feature, Poison, Wonderstruck alternates between separate narrative lines set in different eras, with each given its own visual style. One story, set in 1927, is made to resemble a sleek silent melodrama; the other, set in 1977, has a grittier look reminiscent of American films made around that time. The influence of silent melodrama is palpable in other ways—the plot is driven by outlandish coincidences, and the characters are defined in broad strokes. Though it’s always clear as to what the characters are feeling, Haynes and screenwriter Brian Selznick (adapting his own YA novel) emphasize the narrative form above any emotional content. Wonderstruck feels like an intellectual puzzle, inviting viewers to identify parallels between the stories and guess how they might intersect.
In Wonderstruck, wonderment serves as a coping mechanism for personal tragedies. Haynes and Selznick visualize this idea in their depiction of the natural history museum—filled with artifacts from all over the planet, the museum is a place to get lost in. It’s rather like the structure of Wonderstruck itself, rife with information and winding passages and speaking to a sense of curiosity most of us experience as children. There’s a dark side to that curiosity, however—as the film suggests, giving oneself over to curiosity means abandoning a bit of oneself as well.
