It’s taken a long time for Audrey Niffenegger’s hit novel The Time Traveler’s Wife to make it to the screen (Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston bought the rights before it was released in 2003) and fans of the book will be happy find its charms largely intact. Though it’s being marketed as a bubbly romance, the film is much darker and cerebral than that, although it does bear the unfortunate mark of Miramax Oscar bait — upper-middle class WASPs with a predilection for chunky sweaters; Toronto fronting as Chicago; unreal jobs; too-perfect or too-horrible relationships.
Henry (Eric Bana) is a librarian with a strange affliction — involuntary time travel. It’s a chaotic presence in his life, as he randomly disappears and wakes up in strange times and places of his past. (He also doesn’t get to take his clothes with him when he time travels; a bonus if you like lots of Bana ass.) Eventually, he begins to appear regularly in a meadow, where he meets Clare (Rachel McAdams). The two fall in love and begin to create a life together, which proves to be pretty difficult as Henry’s trips may last anywhere from an hour to a couple of weeks.
Though it weirdly resembles the ill-received Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock vehicle The Lake House, another movie about love and time warps, The Time Traveler’s Wife is much more thoughtful in its sci-fi conceits, whereby time is seen as static and intricately connected, like opening up a novel and reading at random. Unlike older sci-fi versions of time travel, the film puts a postmodern spin on the phenomenon, seeing it as more of a nightmare and a curse than a magical gift. This is particularly true later in the film when the couple’s attempts to have a family are gruesomely thwarted and the prescience that comes with Henry’s time travel has tragic consequences.
Niffenegger’s novel took more time to develop the relationship between Henry and Clare, a luxury the movie doesn’t have. The film has its fair share of treacly moments in needing to quickly build their romance — particularly at the end, when screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin rips off his own melodrama extraordinaire, Ghost. Still, Bana and McAdams are well-matched and the film features the always-welcome Ron Livingston in a supporting role. Though it’ll be difficult for this one to find an audience, fans of more thoughtful romantic sci-fi fare (like John Carpenter’s Starman) will find a lot to enjoy here.
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