Review Movies: The Time Traveller's Wife | Robert Schwentke | Eric Bana | Rachel McAdams | Bruce Joel Rubin | Demi Moore

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 13 August 2009

Clare played by Rachel McAdams and the time-travelling Henry, played by Eric Bana

Touching time tale has weak moments

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE
Directed by Robert Schwentke
Certificate 12A

THIS is a love story with the twist that our leading man zips back and forth through time without any prior warning, making him a little hard work as a prospective lifelong partner.
We meet Clare (Rachel McAdams), who has been in love with Henry (Eric Bana) for her entire life. Henry is cursed with a genetic condition that makes him time-travel, and since first meeting him as a child, has believed they are destined to be together. But how can they build a life when he keeps skipping years?
Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin was behind the Demi Moore/Patrick Swayze hit Ghost, and there are echoes of that gooey tale here.
The flaws in this plot at times are obvious. While our hero is smitten and therefore much of the film is spent proving that he is, you can’y help noticing that he does not seem to make the most out of his rather dire predicament. The only use he gets out of time travel which is not related to this unquenchable love is travelling to a moment where he fiddles the lottery, and this is so he can buy his missus her dream home.
There are no insights as to what he can learn from the past or what the future holds. Generally, the ongoing issue he has to confront when reappearing from another era is he is in the nude and has to find some clothes, sharpish.
This conundrum is presented in a deadpan way.
It takes a classic science fiction plot device and then completely ignores the hows and the whys and the fact this fellow should be a superhero.
There is a nagging feeling that Eric Bana as a lead should have been given a little more to play with. His default look is one of confusion, which I suppose is right as you would be a little confused if you popped in and out of decades with no warning.
But at times more insight into the trauma he faces would have helped you feel more weepy about the whole situation.
Clare has the more interesting role as the woman who knows her love is out there and is just waiting to bump into him again, as he predicted. She is shackled. McAdams is intense to watch.
It doesn’t add up easily. But for all the usual flaws and paradoxes that run through time travel films (How can somebody be in two places at once? Does their behaviour in the present alter the future or the past?), it is gently done and all rather romantic.
Take a loved one to see it. For all its faults, it is at times touching, and quite lovely.

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