Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/22/09
Although
it's been strongly recommended to me, I've never read Audrey Niffenegger's
2003 bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife. But I did always
wonder about it, because time travel is a favorite sci-fi topic of mine,
and I was delighted to see Rachel McAdams, one of my favorite actresses,
cast in the title role of Robert Schwentke's film version. Having
now seen it, I doubt I'll ever get around to that book; The Time Traveler's
Wife is a laboriously serious and respectful filming of a story that
alternates between long stretches of inertia and fits of extreme melodrama.
Pity, because there's lots of potential in the setup and the stars absolutely
glow in their roles. Fans of romance novel-style melodrama may eat
this up, but for those of us who need to see a great romance dramatized
rather than simply stipulated to, it's a 105-minute trip to nowhere.
As
a child, Henry deTamble (Alex Ferris) vanishes from the car at the precise
moment it strikes a truck, killing his mother (Michelle Nolden) behind
the wheel. For a moment, he's at home two weeks earlier and then
he's back on the road, naked and terrified as the adult Henry (Eric Bana)
appears to comfort him. It seems he's been born with a genetic anomaly
that causes him to jump randomly through time, drawn to key places that
were important to his life. At the library where he works, Henry
is approached by 20-year-old woman Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams) who clearly
knows and loves him, though they've never before met. But she's been
seeing him again and again since she was six: the future Henry has
been paying her visits, drawn to the woman who is his soulmate. Soon
the feelings are mutual and before long they're married, even if a future
Henry must jump through time to take the place of the vanished present
version at his own wedding. This becomes more and more of an issue
as Henry leaps in and out of his wife's life. She becomes pregnant,
but suffers one miscarriage after another because of that anomaly.
Can Henry and Clare ever enjoy a normal life together? An ominous
visitor from the future suggests not.
The
Time Traveler's Wife gets off to a promising start in part because
it has the most important thing a romance needs: appealing stars
who're very good at falling in love on screen. The time travel setup
is also intriguing as all get-out at first, with Henry doing a horrible
job of keeping secrets about his knowledge of a future he keeps creating
by telling people in the past to expect it. But it's a bad early
omen when he quickly dispenses in the dialog with the notion that he's
tried again and again to change the past with no success but we never see
him try even once. The Time Traveler's Wife is a movie that
believes in characters sitting around (actually standing, usually while
cooking) having conversations about how they can't change their circumstances.
Think your life is in a rut? Imagine how bad it would be if some
guy kept showing up from the future telling you how everything was going
to go. Some might think it romantic when Henry keeps telling Clare
they have to keep looking at apartments until he sees the one he “knows”
is theirs or settles the question of what to name their daughter after
meeting her in the future and learning what her name is. I found
it a bit deflating: poor Clare doesn't get to choose anything except
what she'll do while sitting around waiting for her missing husband to
reappear.
But
while there's a dusting of regret in the dialog, don't look for the movie
to see the Clare/Henry relationship as anything other than a Great Romance,
even though for all their chemistry they don't do much during their years
together. Lots of cooking, lots of waiting, lots of miscarriages.
It might be OK if the characters seemed happy, but they just don't.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a movie that followed a marriage over the
long-term and made it seem positive: it's the nature of the movies
to seek conflict, and if a couple had only 5 fights in 20 years, those
would be the only 5 scenes we'd see. But from the moment a traveler
strongly hints at Henry's destiny, he and Clare become prisoners of it,
just counting the days. And when that big day arrives, it does so
in the most random and melodramatic way since Kevin Costner's fate in Message
in a Bottle. I assume the target audience for this sort of thing
eats Random up, but I found it supremely unsatisfying. Once daughter
Alba (Hailey McCann at 9 & 10, Tatum McCann at 4 & 5) arrives,
she proves to be an even bigger future-spoiling blabbermouth than her father.
The
movie also has some issues with time as it relates to people's appearances.
McAdams skillfully shifts from 18 to mid-30's, but the film's primary method
of aging Bana is to add tiny bits of grey to his hair. The results
are highly inconsistent: characters repeatedly mention him looking
older when he really doesn't, and he never again looks nearly as old as
the man who traveled back to attend his own wedding. And, of course,
you have to buy into Niffenegger's circular theory of time travel, built
almost entirely on people traveling back from the future to tell people
that things that couldn't have happened without their intervention already
have. If not, your head will explode before the end credits roll.
Schwentke
directs with the methodical, respectful hush of a PGA announcer hoping
it'll result in magic. Instead, we get a bunch of characters who
don't seem particularly invested in their own fates. It's ironic,
because in most movies time travel is about making things possible that
otherwise could never happen. Here, it's just another reason for
a husband to spend way too much time on the road and a couple to give up
on the possibilities of their future way too young. Of course, an
excessive fascination with the inevitability of death is a career trademark
of Ghost's Bruce Joel Rubin, who adapts with a great deal of faith
in the thematic power of love, death and children. I wish he'd shown
us more and trusted a little less.
The
actors are great at connecting with each other, perhaps not so successful
at bringing these characters to life. Bana's Henry doesn't seem at
all like a man who's an expert lockpick and has spent most of his life
running from pursuers and stealing clothes in strange places. And
while Clare initially seems like a free spirit who'd be open to this kind
of surreal relationship, she quickly settles into a familiar movie pattern
of resenting the magic that drew her to her husband in the first place,
and there's nothing McAdams can do to pull out of the death spiral.
The
Time Traveler's Wife doesn't hurt and my attention was held throughout
its' slow, methodical march to the inevitable. But it also left me
empty, wishing for more romance, more science (Stephen Toblowsky plays
a geneticist who tries to puzzle out Henry's issues, but he's an afterthought
perhaps left over from the book) and more passion. Perhaps fans of
the book will process this differently. For that matter, perhaps
all this is exactly what made the book a hit in the first place.
Odds are I'll never find out. As a certain little girl who can't
keep a secret told me, life's too short. |
