Ava DuVernay’s ‘Wrinkle’ hovers, doesn’t soar — and Oprah is distracting

Photo: Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijima, Atsushi Nishijima Storm Reid as Meg Murry.

There are tender emotional moments in “A Wrinkle in Time” — particularly between a father and daughter — that have such warmth that they make you think, OK, this is where director Ava DuVernay is really investing. This is the heart of the movie. Those moments are lovely.

But there’s something about “A Wrinkle in Time” overall that doesn’t take flight. It doesn’t fall to the ground, either, just sort of hovers when it should soar. It’s conscientious. It’s watchable, and it’s never less than competent. But it seems to strive so hard to be inspirational, rather than letting the inspiration come through the story, that it becomes preachy and self-conscious.

The casting of Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which, the most powerful of the three benevolent entities that come to Earth, doesn’t help. Oprah has reached a stage of fame and household familiarity that it’s very hard to accept her as anyone other than herself, even though she’s a good actress. The only way it can work is if she’s playing someone so far removed from the real-life Oprah that we can (partly, never completely) suspend our disbelief.

But here she plays an almost all-powerful being, who is full of sage advice, moral platitudes and concerns about the state of the universe — and sorry, that’s almost an exact match. The last thing “A Wrinkle in Time” needs is to start seeming like a celestial analogue of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” but that’s close to what happens.

Aside from a previous TV adaptation, Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” has never been made into a film, despite being a children’s sci-fi classic that has never gone out of print since its publication in 1962. It tells the story of a 13-year-old girl, who is something of a misfit in school. Meg (Storm Reid) has been that way ever since her father (Chris Pine) completely vanished four years earlier, while working on a means of physically traveling across the universe through mental power.

Most people who know of the disappearance assume the father is just an eccentric, who vanished in order to lend credibility to his zany theories. But there’s another possibility: Maybe he traveled to the other side of the galaxy and then got, you know, stuck there. Here’s a screenwriting test: Which one of the two would you choose?

Anyway, one night Meg is moping around the house, talking to her mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), when her prodigy little brother Charles (Deric McCabe) lets in off the street a wacky lady who calls herself Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and seems to know the entire family. Later Meg and her brother meet up with Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and Mrs. Which (Oprah), and the three ladies transport the two youngsters, plus a friend and potential boyfriend for Meg (Levi Miller) millions of light-years away.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is a moral tale. The three ladies are beings of light, but as we soon find out, there is such a thing as darkness, and the never-ending battle between good and evil turns out not to be unique to Earth. “The only thing that travels faster than light is darkness,” Mrs. Which says, and that line jumps out because we know that’s true.

At one point, the kids visit a planet that’s “run by something vicious.” That becomes the occasion for some brilliant set design, a kind of German Expressionism meets “Leave It to Beaver.” The houses are identical and windowless, and when the kids walk between them, they look as though they might get swallowed. And every child outside every house is bouncing a big red ball, in unison. The world of viciousness is a world of ultimate conformity.

But like another current movie, “Annihilation,” “A Wrinkle in Time” spends too much time with its characters walking around a hostile landscape that might, at any point, transform into a land of special effects. The energy drains, and the movie begins to lose some of its moral drive, as the movie subtly shifts from a battle against ultimate evil to a battle against negative thought and politically incorrect ideology. At one point, Mrs. Which talks about the Earth’s beings of light who’ve kept us from darkness, and you expect to hear names like Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Confucius, the Dalai Lama, Joan of Arc or Plato, and instead she mentions, among others, Einstein and Nelson Mandela. Great people, to be sure, but it sounds more like an Oprah list than a Mrs. Which list.

It’s understandable and practically inevitable that with “A Wrinkle in Time,” DuVernay would respond to our current American moment and try to craft a message of hope. But she creates the kind of pep talk that only reminds you of your problems, and we end up feeling worse.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

A Wrinkle

in Time

Drama. Starring Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey and Chris Pine. Directed by Ava DuVernay. (PG. 109 minutes.)