The Time Traveler’s Wife (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
by Michael Wilmington
Time travel movie romances, like the locus classicus, Somewhere in Time are usually about the transience of love and desire, the bittersweet impossibility of reclaiming the past. That’s the theme of The Time Traveler’s Wife, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s novel and written by Bruce Joel Rubin of Ghost.
The two central time-crossed lovers, played by Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, a movie couple with a genuine glow on screen, are Clare, who keeps meeting her lover in and out of time sequence, beginning when she’s a little girl in a sunny field, and Henry, who’s afflicted with fits of involuntarily time travel that send him hopping in and out of chronology — and in an out of Clare’s life.
Their story is like that of the lady in love with the sailor, who can’t resist the pull of the sea, or, to get more modern, like the predicament of the wife of a big movie star who keeps zipping off to one new location after another. The ending is of course, wet handkerchief sad and wanna be redemptive — and since Henry keeps disappearing in swatches, like a melting ice cream cone, you get clued into his vanishings and Clare‘s super-tolerance for them. And it’s obvious when we see his oldest nude body (no clothes for time travelers in this movie, which made me wish he’d taught the trick to Clare), writhing and gunshot on a floor, that we and the lovers are heading toward Tearsville.
I didn’t think the story made much sense, especially compared to a terrifically twisty little time travel science fiction classic like Robert Heinlein’s By Your Bootstraps or All You Zombies, or (the ultimate change the past and future tale, Ray Bradbury’s The Sound of Thunder — and the writers are especially loose with their planted idea that time travelers can’t change the future or the past, no matter how much they may want to — something that doesn’t seem to hold here for pregnancies, financial windfalls and lots of other stuff.
Director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan) and his crew make the move look crisp and luscious, and the audience I saw it with, had a good time, treating as a sort of Jim Carrey high concept comedy and chuckling part of the way through. But though I cried a little at Rubin‘s Ghost — mostly because I shared it with a dying girlfriend — I thought the romantic luminosity of McAdams and Bana was a little wasted here. Still, if you’re a sucker for this kind of movie, you may forgive it, just as the wife keeps forgiving her time traveler, murmuring perhaps “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill” … and hubby home from twenty years hence. But I still wish time travel movies, which scored big with Richard Matheson Somewhere in Time would give us something a little more Heinleinish.
