Gone are all the biblical quotations. Sure, the film is still spiritual, replacing the Bible with quotes from the Buddha and the Islamic poet Rumi. And there are still good messages here. We’re still given a canvas where light and dark do battle, but in an unmoored, affirmational, we’re all creatures of the universe sort of way. But Jesus has been completely expelled.
It’s a shame, given that all the pieces were in place to treat L’Engle’s faith-centric elements well. Director Ava DuVernay did a wonderful job of reflecting Martin Luther King Jr.’s faith in her masterpiece Selma. Jim Whitaker, A Wrinkle in Time’s producer, is a Christian, and he told me in a recent interview that he picks projects that reflect his values.
“I happen to believe very strongly in hope, and the ability for people to come from a dark place and be able to rise out to a place that’s much better than where they started,” he said. “Every film I’ve done, I’ve at least had an idea of what it was that I was making and why I was making it.”
Whitaker believes that many spiritual elements made it into the film, and he’s right. (I want to talk more about those next week, if time allows.) But Whitaker also said that A Wrinkle in Time’s makers also wanted to “honor the wide array of faith in the endeavor.” The movie should be accessible to folks of all beliefs, he said, not just the Christian one.
Jennifer Lee, who wrote the screenplay for Wrinkle, went a dispiriting step further in an interview with Uproxx. Writing about L’Engle’s use of Christianity in the source book, Lee said, “In a good way, I think there are a lot of elements of what she wrote that we have progressed as a society and we can move onto the other elements.”
But stripping the element of L’Engle’s faith out of her work isn’t some superficial thing—the equivalent of burning off a wart or something. It’s a heart transplant. And the movie suffers for it, not just spiritually, but aesthetically.
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