There's one good thing I can say about Wonderstruck but that's it

Let's start with something positive, OK? Todd Haynes does a fine job in re-creating the look and feel and sound of life on busy midtown Manhattan streets, mid-day, in 1977 (although his re-creation of E 81st Street looks more like E 181st Street) and he does a fine job as well w/ his extended interior sequences in the Museum of Natural History - following 2 boys rushing around among the crowds of visitors and then after hours tucked away in a museum cranny: nice sequences, interesting lighting and pacing - even if the museum is already a bit of a cinematic trope (Squid & Whale, q.v.). That said, Wonderstruck is a horrible film in almost every imaginable way. How shall I count them? (Spoilers to follow, I guess): First, how can we possibly believe that a 12-year-old boy, stricken deaf (temporarily? That's never discussed) when he is on the telephone during a lighting strike who leaves a hospital bed and takes off - from rural Minnesota no less! - by Trailways bus for NYC where he spends several days roaming around - and no one misses him or seriously searches for him? And what the parallel plot (in 1927) about a 12-year-old girl who has complete deafness who leaves her wicked, wealthy father in Hoboken and crosses the river to NYC, tracks down her mother (a famous actress of the silent screen), wanders around in same history museum and eventually is taken in by her older brother who then - for the first time! - enrolls her in a school for the deaf and her life turns around so that 50 years later she's a gorgeous (Julianne Moore) grandmother of Trailways boy? OK, I can accept, sometimes, extremely unlikely plot developments but this movie goes beyond the beyond: Trailways boy goes to NYC in search of info about the father he's never known. He sets off because he found a bookmark w/ the name of a bookstore among some papers Dad left behind. And this is a clue that will lead him to his father? A bookmark? Anyway, he arrives in NYC, almost immediately meets another young boy who takes him on a tour of the Nat Hist Museum - and it just so happens that the long-lost father had worked setting up diaramas for the museum! Seriously? I won't belabor these and other absurd plot elements any further but have to point out the central problem: Why is this young boy in desperate search for into about his father? True, his father and mother never married - but what's w/ the big secret? Why won't his mother (conveniently dead now, from a car crash) - or anyone else in his family or small town - tell him who is father is or was? Especially in that his mother (Michelle Williams) took him in youth to see the Nat Hist Museum and a ceremony for this father (which the boy oddly cannot remember)? And as to the father - after all the build-up - there's nothing whatsoever mysterious about his life or his death. He came to Minnesota to work on this project, had a relationship w/ Williams, that ended, he went home, later died of "a bad heart." Without tension, build-up, or surprise, there's nothing to hold our attention or engage us in any way w/ this young boy and his journey of discovery.