{"id":9676,"date":"2022-12-14T19:27:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T00:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9676"},"modified":"2022-12-14T19:32:40","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T00:32:40","slug":"the-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/14\/the-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wonder."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Wonder<\/em> is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room<\/em>), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fant\u00e1stica<\/a><\/em>, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in 1862, The Wonder<\/em> tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (K\u00edla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she\u2019s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there\u2019s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she\u2019s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he\u2019s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it\u2019s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wonder<\/em> isn\u2019t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children \u2013 and, really, all manner of people \u2013 as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna\u2019s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they\u2019re willing to overlook signs that she\u2019s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna\u2019s family that she\u2019s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, you can\u2019t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion\u2019s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island\u2019s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn\u2019t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species<\/em> just three years prior to the film\u2019s setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This film is nearly all about Pugh\u2019s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those \u201cwhatever she\u2019s in, I\u2019ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it\u201d actors, and while she\u2019s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder<\/em>, it\u2019s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who\u2019s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy\u2019s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention \u2013 its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music \u2013 and that might be why Pugh\u2019s been overlooked in a very packed category. I\u2019ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what\u2019s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fant\u00e1stica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,161,215,968],"class_list":["post-9676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","tag-netflix","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9679,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9676\/revisions\/9679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}