It would be enough for this to be a wonderful narrative, but Selznick has done it again, creating something even more wonderful than his The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
In 1977 Ben, a young boy dreams of wolves and grieves for his recently dead mother. Unable to sleep he wanders from his aunt and uncle's lodge in the woods on the edge of Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, the short distance to his former home and finds a mysterious book about the first kinds of museums known as Cabinets of Wonders and telephone number. Lightning strikes as he tries to dial the number and he is deafened.
In 1927 Rose, a deaf girl of a similar age to Ben, gazes across the river at Manhattan and runs away to find the beautiful silent movie star Lillian Mayhew and seeks shelter in the company of her brother Walter, creator of an entire room of Wonders.
This story would be in and of itself delicately and achingly rendered, but Selznick's combination of text with stunning pencil drawings is unique, not a comic but not simply illustrations either, the drawings having a narrative value of their own like a comic without the speech bubbles. Just as Ben and Rose's stories speak to each other across 5 decades the pictures and words are in a dialogue creating something truly spellbinding.
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