Recensioni de* critic*

The sheer intricacy of the film’s construction, including the overlap between its parallel story lines, is in keeping with Haynes’s precision, but he doesn’t quite reach his intended tone of wistful enchantment; you can feel the strain behind the whimsy.

I mostly admired "Wonderstruck," which cross-cuts between two stories of two children living fifty years apart, mainly for its (seemingly lavish) period details, its many bold or clever directorial touches, and the assured flow of its imagery. . . . Unfortunately, the final section succumbs to a curiously commercial (for Haynes) urge to tie everything up in a too-neat bow.

With its emotional heart nested in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History and the Queens Museum's miniature panorama of New York, the story uncovers not only the sense of wonder but also the loneliness and ache of loss that underlie the curator's—and filmmaker's—desire to collect, preserve, and re-create.

It may be Haynes's saddest feature to date. 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.

The film, in its substance and in its intercut construction, exists for one purpose: to show how the two sets of characters from the two time frames fit together. The entire movie is disparate, its two tracks of action merely parallel... until the connections, near the end, are laid bare. That's why, for the most part, "Wonderstruck" is tedious: it's less a drama than a puzzle that exists to deliver its completed picture, a column of figures meant solely to add up to a predetermined sum.

The movie strikes a curious emotional tone, alternating between suspense and quiet wistfulness, with sudden surges of operatic intensity as the two timelines begin to connect. Still, all the moods hang together like the movements of a piece of classical music expressing different tempos: allegro, adagio, andante. This may be the most music-driven of Haynes' films yet.

Haynes, mostly recognized as a leader in queer filmmaking, is reminding us here that his more specific interest is in outsiders—and in cinema's ability to chip away at their lived experiences through subtle experiments in form. His filmmaking is as intellectual as it is emotional: He makes you feel the power of objects, glances, touches, and the rest. Movies are above all experiences. Every good director knows that, but Wonderstruck is a movie by the rare filmmaker gifted enough to show it.

Even as he follows Mr. Selznick's narrative lead, Mr. Haynes quietly and touchingly makes "Wonderstruck" his own because the wonder of the film isn't in its story but in its telling. It's in the expressive beauty of his images, the expansiveness of his ideas and the way he naturally, generously brings a once-upon-a-time girl and boy to life, allowing them to find themselves — in their willfulness, their heartbreaks and their imaginings — so that eventually they can find someone else.

This is an intricate, high-reaching piece of film-making, and there are places where the mechanics don't run as smoothly as they should. But the film's beauty runs so deep, it doesn't matter. Wonderstruck embraces so many shimmery, evanescent ideas, it's a marvel that any picture--let alone one you can take your kids to--can hold them.

There is so much packed in here; Wonderstruck is simultaneously the densest and loosest film Haynes has made. And, like many stories based on books for children, much of it makes more emotional than logical sense. I was wowed by pretty much all of it, but the moment that most resonates — the one that seems to embody the whole movie — comes early on, as Rose stands on a boat headed for Manhattan, holding a newspaper clipping about the actress she's searching for.

Rose's story would be unbearably sad, and the journey that brings her to Ben might seem like too much to endure, except that new relationships have been formed along the way, new connections made. One story ends and another begins; the world keeps changing. Still, as Haynes's protagonists look at the stars in the film's concluding shot, they have finally found, for this moment, a place to belong.

Its rhymes across a half-century will probably find more resonance among chest-thumping cinephiles than an actual ticket-buying public, which is a shame, as the film is already a rare artifact for trying something new and daring, as earnest as it is unfashionable.