The Time Traveler's Wife shows the pains of the chronologically challenged (Review)

And I thought Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) had it bad. In Quantum Leap, he travels through time, landing in different people’s bodies, but at least he had a friend and mission. Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) gets no such luxuries. He randomly disappears, re-appears naked somewhere, and has to steal clothes and start running to survive. Worse, he never knows when he’ll disappear again. It’s hard to imagine Henry having any friends, which is why I enjoyed learning how manages to bag a girl. The Time Traveler’s Wife is more a “living with a disappearing man” story than it is about love, and it’s more interesting for it.

This is a movie guys may enjoy when their girl makes them watch it. While she’s into the love story, he can ponder all the time paradoxes, and fun ways that someone randomly disappear. Unfortunately, thinking about it too hard could ruin your day or, worse, turn you into obsessive Nicholas Cage from Knowing. I’m guessing the novel its based on explains more, but the movie does not get into the rules that dictate Henry’s time and space travels. What we do know: it’s caused by a gene error, its a dominant trait (offspring will probably get it), its triggered in a similar way to epilepsy, and Henry often travels back to the same locations.

Henry doesn’t appear to have any conscious or subconscious control over where or when he’s going , but he seems to go back to familiar places suspiciously often. He usually ends up somewhere around Chicago at some time during (or near) his own lifetime. Why not appear in the Jurassic period and have to run away from dinosaurs? Maybe ancient Rome. Couldn’t he appear before the planet was even formed, or on another? The Time Traveler’s Wife is not interested in these things. All we know is that he seems to disappear to some random location, then re-appear back in his normal timeline and home after some random period of time. This causes obvious problems for Harry, who wants to hold down a job and raise a family.

At home waiting is Clare (Rachel McAdams). Clare has known Henry ever since she was a child and he kept appearing in her backyard, sometimes old, sometimes young. By the time she meets his young self, she is already in love, but he doesn’t know who the hell she is. The two share decent chemistry, and its fun to see them interact, though it doesn’t happen enough. See, Henry keeps disappearing without warning. At one point he vanishes while carrying plates to the dinner table. The plates smash to the ground, covering his now empty clothes with spaghetti. And so Clare eats alone, and slowly starts to wonder why she married someone so out of sync with reality. If I were her, I wouldn’t trust him to do anything out of eyesight. Imagine giving him something valuable, like a family wedding ring to deliver, only for it to drop on the street somewhere. And his clothing budget has to be astronomical. Anyway, things only get worse when they try to have a child and Henry’s trips start becoming more frequent, endangering his own life.

Director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan) and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) do an impressive job holding this movie together and getting us to care about someone with such an odd condition. One beautiful shot, in particular, has the camera fly around the bed from an odd angle and show the two of them vertically even though they’re laying down, perhaps emphasizing that Clare and Henry can never really rest in peace. Rubin and Schwentke make some odd choices though. Henry sees a genetics engineer because his future self told him too (who told him?), but the engineer never seems to make any progress in figuring out how to curb his travels. Clare’s character could have been more developed, as we don’t entirely understand why she sticks with Henry, though I still felt for her at the end of the film.

There is talk that the film will become a TV series. I think it’s a good idea. Henry’s life isn’t served well in a two-hour movie. He needs more time.

Score: 3 out of 5 (Competent, but I like Quantum Leap better)