A love story whose dialogue, direction and intellectual follow-through can't live up to the romantic potential of its premise, "The Time Traveler's Wife" might have been a heartbreaker in other hands.
Likable actors such as Rachel McAdams and Ron Livingston look unexpectedly shallow here, in need of assistance director Robert Schwentke can't give them. As a result, the film never gets secure in its precarious perch between fairy tale and science fiction, and lines that might not raise eyebrows in a romantic novel — McAdams actually has to say "a thousand times 'yes'!" when Eric Bana proposes to her — sound like the dross they are.
 Courtesy photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
For a larger, high resolution image, click HERE |
Despite its title, the movie's real protagonist is not the wife but the traveler. Bana's Henry suffers from a strange condition that causes him to dematerialize on occasion (a process beautifully visualized by the special effects team, and sometimes used to poetic effect by Schwentke), leaving one moment and popping up in another.
Henry's clothes don't travel with him, which always causes trouble on the other end of the time-jump. But this difficulty, like many other practical ramifications that might have made the fantasy more convincing for viewers, is underexplored. Instead, the movie attempts to focus on the effects the condition has on a love affair that is both made possible and threatened by it.
It's best not to think too hard about just how this time travel thing gets the relationship started and just enjoy the unusual interactions the set-up allows. When Clare Abshire (McAdams) is a little girl, a dashing middle-age man appears on a field one day and announces he is a time traveler. He returns repeatedly over the years, making friends with her. She makes him the object of all her adolescent schoolgirl fantasies, and by the time their paths cross in "real time" when she's an adult, she's ready to jump right into a love affair that the twentysomething version of Henry knows nothing about.
Then comes the hard stuff, like having a husband who can't keep from vanishing on his wedding night, or having unsuccessful pregnancies that seem to be doomed by dad's condition. (Who knew the ability to time travel would prove to be a genetic abnormality?)
The movie's general disinterest in explaining its conceit is compounded by the occasional bit of outright dumbness. When the two get married, their first dance is to a version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" so dirgelike it makes Joy Division sound like Hannah Montana. Henry uses his abilities to buy Clare a winning lottery ticket, which somehow thrills her despite the fact that her family is already incredibly wealthy. A mysterious tragedy explained in the closing scenes plays out like a very lame joke instead of the tearjerker it's supposed to be.
Still, the movie manages a few intriguing second-half plot twists almost despite itself, and its ineffective storytelling doesn't keep it from offering the occasional standalone scene with real emotional appeal. They're nothing to carry the movie into the kind of dreamy territory of a "Somewhere in Time," to be sure, but there might be enough to keep disappointed viewers from wishing they had the power to leap two hours backward in their lives and stay home instead.
