Movie Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) 

Directed by Robert Schwentke 

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin 

Starring Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams, Arliss Howard, Ron Livingston

Release Date August 14th, 2009 

Published August 14th, 2009 

A movie involving time travel is, quite obviously, held to its own logical standard. The film will have every opportunity to establish its own universe and create logic that makes sense to its characters and gives those of us watching something we can invest in without spending all of our time questioning logistics.

The Time Traveler's Wife starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams blows up its own logic and loses much of the audience within its first 5 minutes. This dopey romance that wants to combine sci-fi conventions with The Notebook style melodrama fails miserably at every turn stranding a pair of terrific actors in the wake of one supremely dumb story.

As a little boy Henry DeTamble was in the backseat of his mother's car when suddenly they were in a spin and headed to wicked accident. Then just as suddenly Henry was standing on the side of the road naked. The truck that was to kill he and his mother roars past and then a man emerges from nowhere to wrap him in a blanket. The man is future Henry and he has repeated this scene numerous times.

Henry is a time traveler though he doesn't want to be. He has a condition that causes him to simply disappear and then appear, completely nude, somewhere in time. One place where Henry seems to arrive regularly is a field near the home of wealthy family. What draws him to this spot is a little girl named Claire who, in the future, will become Henry's wife.

Claire and Henry met repeatedly when she was little and up through her teens but when she finally meets Henry when she is in college, he has no idea who she is. This version of Henry has yet to meet Claire and the two share a very confused dinner encounter and some very unexpected, for Henry, intimacy.

Thus begins a very complicated romance and marriage. She wants a normal life and a family and he wants to give it to her but his many trips through time continue to interrupt their life. Can Claire and Henry make a life together despite his time traveling? Will you care by the end?

My description of the plot is far less ludicrous than the way things play out on screen. Director Robert Schwentke and writer Bruce Joel Rubin craft the story in a way that is a little like series television. Henry time travels. He has an encounter where he steals clothes confronts someone and then time travels again. The scenes are ike really dopey episodes of Quantum Leap limited to 2 minute lengths.

What the makers of The Time Traveler's Wife want is for us in the audience to fall for the romance and not notice the many, many logical compromises and outright creepy weirdness that are part of the whole time travel conceit. Henry's encounters in the past and future set up questions about the timeline of his life and Claire's that the movie has no intention, or is it ability, to answer.

When it comes to the subject of Henry and Claire's trouble having children, more unwanted questions arise. And still more questions when Henry and Claire finally have a child and she (Tatum and Hailey McCann play the daughter at different ages) has Henry's talent for time travel.

The logistical questions go from awkward to bizarre to just plain creepy by the end of the movie and then the film manages to find an ending that is even more outlandish and will send audiences home shaking their head. All I will say is, pay attention to Claire's father who is shoehorned into a subtextual role in the movie that really makes very little sense.

Foolishness abounds in The Time Traveler's Wife. Some of it is of the so bad it's funny variety. Most of it is just plain dumb.

Movie Review: Beat

Beat (2000) 

Directed by Gary Walkow 

Written by Gary Walkow 

Starring Norman Reedus, Kiefer Sutherland, Courtney Love, Kyle Secor, Ron Livingston 

Release Date January 29th, 2000 

Published October 29th, 2002 

Knowing little more than the names of the Beat poets of the 1950's I was intrigued to see a film that I assumed would shed some light on the work and motivation of what has been called the golden age of American poetry. Instead, with the drama, Beat, we get a very short and at times quite dull love story involving bland secondary characters who rotate around the poets one would expect the film to focus on.

Beat stars Courtney Love as Joanie Burroughs, the wife of William S. Burroughs, whose death at his hands in 1951 is said to be what launched William S. Burroughs' best work. Burroughs is played by Kiefer Sutherland, in what amounts to an extended cameo. His Burroughs spends most of the film pursuing an off camera affair with another man. In 1951, the Burroughs are living in Mexico as William ducks a heroin conviction in New York. Here, they are visited by a pair of old friends, Allen Ginsburg (Ron Livingston) and Lucien Carr (Norman Reedus). Their aim for their trip is to convince Joan to come back to New York with or without William. Lucien is in love with Joan and sees William's cheating as his opportunity to steal her away.

While one might expect a film about poets to be very talky, not much more than talking happens in Beat, though not the kind of talking you would hope for. I was hoping to hear poetry, but, for a film that features William S. Burroughs, Allan Ginsburg and alludes to a character playing Jack Kerouac, there is surprisingly little poetry. Livingston is also the film's narrator and, at times, he does riff, but those riffs are abbreviated. Most of the film consists of discussions about Lucien having been released from jail after murdering a gay friend (Homicide's Kye Secor), who tried to get a little too close. Reedus's Lucien is often referred to as the catalyst of the New York poetry scene, though he does not seem to compose much (if any) poetry. His place in history is not well known.

The film's ending, also portrayed in the Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch, is tragic but not unexpected. Anyone familiar with Burroughs' history knows this actually happened. Whether or not the incident portrayed followed so closely after a visit by Carr and Ginsburg is unclear. Most of the film is an allusion to events as they may have happened, implying the reason and motivations.

Clocking in at a slim 67 minutes, Beat begins with little narrative momentum and runs out of it quickly. The film has no story, and what's worse, it has some of the most fascinating people of the last half-century but doesn't portray them doing what they do best. A movie about poets with little or no poetry... whose idea was this?