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.
