*½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore
directed by Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn
by Walter Chaw It’s possible to catch the zeitgeist express and still suck, and here’s the proof: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck’s flaccid, disturbing, Les Miz-for-kids Disney flick, Wish. On the verge of giving her fondest wish to the autocrat King Magnifico (Chris Pine) in exchange for his beneficent magical protection, 17-year-old Asha (Ariana DeBose) discovers that Magnifico is actually a fanatical, power-drunk, authoritarian zealot. His greatest fear is that one of his people in the kingdom of Rosas may nurse a fond wish that leads to his downfall, so he hoards them, extracting them during a ritual from his people as they grow from childhood to the rest of their wish-less lives. He keeps them as bubbles of blue smoke in a glass observatory in his castle. Why doesn’t he just destroy the ones he deems dangerous?
Asha is a classic Disney heroine who makes the critical error of asking Magnifico why her grandfather Sabino (Victor Garber) can’t have his wish finally fulfilled upon his hundredth birthday. The wish in question–to write a song that inspires the next generation–has been deemed too radical is why. Magnifico shows his true colours and, crushed, Asha assembles her posse of lovable misfit village children to overthrow their ruler. She has magical help, though, in the form of an adorable wishing star she’s summoned with a real curtain-raiser of a Broadway-style number belted with Best Original Song gusto. Their plan to convince the King to return everyone’s wishes for the people to do with as they please brings to mind great ideas of the past like the Internet or Pandora’s Box. There are two things Wish forces you to consider, and the first is that it is a child’s version of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in which the MacGuffin is a thing that could conjure a person’s fondest wish. The second is that no one has really thought through the ramifications of the movie’s premise. In Stalker, the people who are given their wish kill themselves. In Wish, the first thing the New Republic of Rosas does when it expresses the power of its people is to exile Magnifico into a two-dimensional purgatory for the rest of eternity.
Grim. More than grim, it appears to be an apologia for a certain kind of groupthink that glorifies the dreams of the individual over social consequences and the need for an organizing principle. This seems like sympathy for the devil, right? For a defense of murdering dreams in favour of finding fulfillment in quotidian pursuits? I propose a middle road where kids maybe shouldn’t be told they can have or do anything they want, should they only wish it hard enough. On the one hand, the timing for a film like this is good, appearing as it does in the middle of an active period of protest and organized labour action–and indeed, the climactic battle features the citizens of Rosas manifesting the sentiments of “Good Morning Starshine” to focus their twinkle and collectively rise above. Wish‘s connection to Hair is more than follicle-deep, in fact: both are pieces of pop provocation appearing during a period of unpopular war and social unrest. But only one of them has the courage to say that the usual pragmatism and distraction will snuff out all this energy. Wish has its “Good Morning Starshine,” but not its “Flesh Failures” that “face a dying nation of moving paper fantasy.”
And on the other hand, the timing of Wish is terrible, because all I can think about is all the dead children chalked up as casualties of an inevitable religious war designed to bring about the end of the world by the death cult we have collectively voted into power. This suffering is the product of wishes, too–the ones had by “good” people worshiping “good” religions. Asha and the plight of her little buddies hits differently now than it would have a year ago, six months ago. King Magnifico–white, bearded, unshakeable in the belief of the correctness of his wisdom–hits differently as well; the idea that a cult leader or a nation of people not doing a good job of disguising how quickly they turn to retribution and tribalism might see the hell they’ve created as utopia is possibly the only thing I found realistic about Wish, even as Wish promises that what you’re seeing when you’re watching a horror movie’s resolution is something good instead of something depressing. I think that’s the overriding impulse driving Wish‘s creation: the wish that this aggressive harvesting of every Disney movie that worked (and a few that didn’t) strikes you as novel and uplifting rather than as an endorsement for the way things always were: vengeance-fuelled and misdirected. In the end, the first casualty of war is always innocence.
