Le musée des merveilles

Unbelievably dull. Turned it off. Don't bother. Nothing positive to say. Save your time and money.

Director Todd Haynes ("Carol") has brought forth yet another slow paced film with "Wonderstruck". Containing almost no dialogue, the strong score (by Carter Burwell) fills the void of the voices and provides all the sounds of the emotions and environment in which the two main terrific child actors Ben (Oakes Fegley "Pete's Dragon") and Rose (relative newcomer and deaf actress Millicent Simmonds) encounter. At Ben's side, and with a voice, is his new friend and equally talented young actor Jamie (Jaden Michael "Baby Jaguar VO in Dora the Explorer) who unexpectedly helps move the two very different yet parallel stories of Ben and Rose along. While the jumping back and forth from the eras of 1920 (Rose) and 1970's (Ben) kept the film interesting, additional flashbacks explaining Ben's history, a cameo by Michelle Williams as Ben's mom, and double character rolls by Julianne Moore (as Lillian Mayhew and the older Rose) just left me confused and frustrated. Not frustrated enough to walk out, but enough that I just went with the flow and stopped trying to figure things out. Carter Burwell's score will surely be in Oscar consideration, Haynes' ability to capture the various periods will find Oscar traction, and costumes wizard Sandy Powell will once again be in the running for an Award. The film is based on book by Brian Selznick's, and I can hope the storyline in the book was easier to follow.

This film tells the stories of two deaf children, in different eras in New York.

It is unfortunate that the film is just painfully slow to the point that I can skip thirty seconds at a time and still miss nothing. I don't really need to see scenes of characters walking the streets for a whole minute, walking up the stairs for thirty seconds or just sitting for a minute. Most of the film has no dialogue, which is not a problem in itself, but there is just no message to fill the screen. The museum scenes in the two different eras may be trying to make viewers compare and contrast the treatment of deaf children in different eras, but it just does not work at all. It is just tedious and boring. Even Julianne Moore cannot save this film from being a tremendous bore.

This film was positively wonderful. I am dumbstruck at it's IMDB rating. For crying out loud it's a magical children's tale with a soundtrack that includes Brian Eno/Robert Fripp and 70s soul jams. It's disability-positive, the way the sound is done to convey deaf children navigating NYC is extremely creative and well done. The art and scenes are what I worshipped as a child - my greatest fantasy was to find a secret room in a museum and stay the night! And the dioramas and the incredible way they wove them into the storytelling! The people saying "nothing dramatic happens" are seriously off their rockers - a kid loses his hearing!!! two deaf children run away to NYC!!! how on Earth is that not dramatic? This film made me cry and laugh and feel like a child again. It's beautiful. If you have a child, watch it with them. If you don't, like me, watch it and feel like a kid again.

How is a Todd Haynes film with a character based on Lillian Gish this bad? And why is this his follow-up to Carol?!

This YA mystery – adapted by its author – has an intriguing dual- time structure, a nice Carter Burwell score and some neat nods to silents, but it's also cloying, not very mysterious, and incredibly longwinded: not trusting its audience to understand anything, and struggling with some laborious translation problems reminiscent of Le mèpris, in which a lot of the dialogue has to be written down and held up. It doesn't help that the central kid seems to have wandered in from a school play. Or that it ends up looking like an extended advertorial for some museums.

It's sort of like Hugo, if everything that Scorsese's film had done had gone a bit wrong.

(The Gish films being homaged, incidentally, are primarily The Wind (the poster of the film-within-a-film starring 'Lillian Mayhew' is based directly on a publicity image for this 1928 masterpiece) and Orphans of the Storm, though she played mothers in few of her starring vehicles and Wonderstruck diverts considerably from her real life.)