Movie Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

I expected The Time Traveler's Wife to be a heavy romantic chick flick; not that there's anything wrong with that. I also expected the time travel element to be unexplained and merely a plot device, which worked fine in films like Frequency and Pleasantville. Instead I found I spent a lot of time trying to sequence the events in my head (and they all fit together quite well) and trying to figure out when the next time travel twist would come. Unexpectedly, I actually wanted more romance. The New York Times called it "a dirge about love instead of an ode" and there's something to that.

I've liked all the Rachel McAdams films I've seen (Mean Girls, Red Eye, and Wedding Crashers), certainly more than I've expected to, and she's good in this film as Clare. Eric Bana is also pretty good as Henry, but it's the script that lets them down. I hadn't read the book, though I did see McAdams on The Daily Show and she gave away much of the plot, I'll try not to do that. Henry uncontrollably take random jaunts through time, flashing to the past or the future. He arrives naked and stays for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of weeks. Early in the film he meets Clare, who claims to know him as his future self has visited her past. As the title implies, they marry and she has to cope with the consequences of his condition.

I've seen criticism about how preposterous the story is. Well, yeah it's time travel but either accept the story premise or don't see the film. Within the confines of the premise I think the story works, that is it's internally consistent. I have a few quibbles. At one point Henry says he's visited a particular event hundreds of times, but wouldn't that mean there would be a crowd of him standing around? A crowd we didn't see when we saw the event. Also, when Henry first meets Clare, he's surprised that she knows him, and even if this is the first time he's met someone who knows him but he doesn't yet know, I expected him to have thought about the possibility or at least grasp the concept faster than he did.

A few times we see the event only from one point of view. He's away for two weeks and she gets very lonely and annoyed and they argue when he returns. That's fine for showing the problems of the relationship. But I wanted to know where he was for that long and what he went through. As one of the longer trips he'd taken I expected it to be significant.

A few reviews have commented that they found it creepy that she first meets him as a little girl and he arrives naked standing behind bushes in a field. For me, the bigger problem was that the romance felt more predestined than real, and Clare even says as much at one point. The story spends too much time on dealing with the inconveniences of his disappearances rather than letting us get to know these characters. If they had met as adults in a normal situation, I have no idea if they would have fallen for each other.

* Spoilers *

There were two things that occurred to me while watching the film and I'm surprised neither happened.

From the first scene we meet him, I was waiting for Henry's father to be revealed as a time traveler. I think it was obvious that he was, but they just didn't say so. Since the daughter was a time traveler we know it's hereditary. Henry said drinking sets of his trips and we know the father drank a lot. We don't know why he left Henry's mother. Henry says he always disappears and then was really happy that he could make the wedding. I figured that was a sure hint he was a time traveler. If he wasn't, why wouldn't he make his son's wedding?

I also found the wedding scene interesting. Present day Henry disappears and a future Henry appears and stands in for him during the ceremony and wedding night. I thought it would have been really interesting if Clare experienced time linearly but with Henry's from non-sequential timelines. One day she's with 30 year-old Henry, the next 33 year-old Henry, then 27, 41 42, 26. It probably would have been even less romantic and more tedious, but perhaps it's an idea for another story.