The Time Traveler’s Wife is an example of the ‘high concept’ film we used to hear so much about. The film you can describe in a single line – ‘guy time travels while wife lonely’. It’s a very well executed film but brings little to the well worn romantic weeper genre, despite solid performances by Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana and competent direction.
This genre is all about uncontrollable out of body experiences that complicate ordinary love, fodder for sweet storybook romances for decades. Ghost for instance, and endless French dramas. While it’s a popular genre, and appeals to hankie clutching fans, it wears thin for those of us wanting new elements or weaned on tougher stuff.
Because basically, we’ve been there and done that and don’t; need to do it again. Over and over and over. That’s the Time Traveler’s Wife’s concept and result. Guy disappears, travels to important moments in his life on repeat mode, woman who knows his secret endures his absences when he tells her he’s been visiting her on different planes. Once or twice is fine, but that is pretty much all there is.
The film is based on a beloved, award-winning book but again. Come on. We’ve had our ghost or ESP-based love heartaches. Longed for and lost, show sup again, lost again, longed for, shows up ….. Like that. Over and over ‘til death us do part. Oh, wait. Death doesn’t part. Time travel is a life sentence. You get the drift. Over and over again.
The Time Traveler’s Wife will inspire floods of tears to wash throughout the multiplex floors. That may have something to do with the star filter on woman’s huge, searching eyes. She looks perpetually mid-weep. These kinds of details simply telegraph when we are to feel some certain emotion, and take responsibility away from the viewer’s intelligence; it’s manipulative and easy, and unfortunately, almost always works.
Bana plays Henry DeTamble and McAdams is his childhood sweetheart and wife Clare (sees all, get it?) Abshire. Clare knows her man is a time traveler and that without the slightest warning he’s apt to drop his drawers and dissolve and be absent for hours and days on end. He does it at the most inopportune but most cinematically dramatic times – five minutes before their wedding, in the wedding bed, during intensive discussions, Christmas Eve, for pity sake, etc., when she needs him most.
She agrees to marry him, knowing theirs will not be a normal life but she feels tied to him because of their lifelong bond. They conceive with difficulty and have a daughter who may be a time traveler. Their child and the child versions of our hero and heroine are just too adorable and sentimental for words. Big eyes and big thoughts.
They’re wise little ragamuffins, tiny adults that have intuitive gifts beyond comprehension –all that innocence and longing and magical thinking. They know the score and may be more evolved than their parents, which happens so often in films, the scary child genre that gave us The Sixth Sense and Orphan.
There are genuinely moving, organic and weep worthy moments. Henry meets his late mother on the subway. He is around 28; she died when he was three. She doesn’t know who he is but they establish a mysterious rapport. She tells him about her three year old boy – him. And he tells her how much her son loves her. Bana’s particularly effective, using restraint to leverage the yearning.
Canada’s popular Broken Social Scene performs at the wedding but the first dance song choice is a strange one. It’s dreary and drippy reminiscent of a 14 year old pining for love, a real mood killer, but in keeping with the film’s overbearing sentimentality.
35 mm romance / fantasy
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