The Time Traveler's Wife

My name is Zach, and I like chick flicks. I realize for the most part that the comedies are terrible and good for only a few chuckles, while the dramas/romances are almost equally bad in their tear-jerker sentimentality and idealism. Nonetheless, I'm a sucker for a sob story, and that's exactly what The Time Traveler's Wife is.

The movie is based around the concept that there's a man named Henry who spontaneously time travels. He fades out of his current time, wakes up naked in a different time and place, and before long travels back to his own time...again naked. Think of it like Terminator, but instead of being a bloodthirsty robot sent to kill John Conner, he's a troubled man with a genetic abnormality. In any case, his time traveling starts when his mother is driving him and gets into an accident. He suddenly fades from the car, and has traveled back two weeks to see his parents reading to him. He then quickly travels back to the present, now outside the car, where he sees the crash and watches his mother (and his other self) die. The adult Henry (Eric Bana) then shows up out of nowhere, explains to his young self what has happened, and then disappears to leave himself to his life.

We then switch to adult Henry's time, where he works at a library. He quickly meets Clare (Rachel McAdams) who seems to intimately know Henry, even though to him they've never met. She explains that in the future he keeps traveling backwards in time and visits her as a little girl, as if drawn there by gravity. She's always been in love with him, and that's obviously just fine with Henry as before you know it they're banging like bunnies and completely in love.

The rest of the movie deals with their relationship and the obvious problems faced by having a sporadic time traveler as a husband. Some very interesting issues of identity are addressed in this movie, about how the person we are when we're younger is really a different person from when we're older. The young Henry is greatly flawed, breaking into stores to find clothes with loner mentality. A guy who's rough around the edges. But the older Henry is much more caring and thoughtful, wise, mature, etc. At least, to the young Clare. There's some great philosophical underpinnings to this story, about destiny, being different people at different times, and which of those people are the right people to be together. The unfortunate thing is that most of that is lost in the mist.

This movie's real problem is that it has a little too much trouble deciding what to focus on. There were several points when it was fairly obvious they were skimming over something important, just to focus more on either the through-line of the plot or to highlight dramatic tension between Clare and Henry. For example, the wonderful Ron Livingston starts out as one of Clare's friends who adds some welcome comedy to the story. He stumbles upon Henry's ability one night...and then disappears for long stretches until needed as the best man at their wedding or as a consummate friend at the end. It just felt like his character had some crucial element to play in the story that was never fleshed out.

And that's really where this movie fell down. The acting was great, as always, from Bana and McAdams, the direction was well done...but the screenplay let them down. It focused too much on little vignettes, and driving the plot through, that the overarching heart of this story leaked away through the spaces in-between. It was by no means bad, but it lacked what it needed to be great.

The Time Traveler's Wife gets a 6.5/10.