The Time Traveler’s Wife

Back in the day Hollywood generated a goodly number of ‘audience pleasing’ romances. Husbands and boyfriends might get dragged to the theater, and be surprised when they liked what they saw.   The Time Traveler’s Wife arrived in 2009, when traditional moviegoing habits were already a thing of the past. Yet it accrued its own following, probably goosed by fans of the original Audrey Niffenegger book. The average response was, ‘it’s not as good as the book, but it’s really good on its own.’

Audiences want romances yet no longer buy the old-fashioned formula of discreet courtship interrupted by conflicts and misundertandings, ending with a happy-happy kiss with a wedding ring attached. In this new ‘invent a time puzzle’ sub-subgenre of  film blanc, couples must instead solve a fantastic riddle to find peace and live happily ever after. The ‘big concept’ time-scramble premise of  Groundhog Day  spawned an unending wave of similar romantic fantasies that warped time and space to bedevil lovers. Groundhog Day didn’t invent the idea of a day that keeps repeating: a Wikipedia page dedicated to  ‘time loop films’ offers earlier examples.

Intense romantic fantasies that cross rational boundaries have been around a long time. Henry Hathaway’s  Peter Ibbetson is delirious surrealism. Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, Je t’aime scrambles time and memory by cutting film as if it were thrown into a blender. The hero of The Time Traveler’s Wife (TTTW) is also an involuntary time traveller, caught in a time puzzle over which he has little control. His situation is similar to that of the confused Billy Pilgrim in the Kurt Vonnegut / George Roy Hill  Slaughterhouse-Five. In a pattern of ‘random irony,’ Pilgrim is propelled into the past and the present, and from Earth to a distant planet.

Like Groundhog Day, TTTW wins us over because its concept offers an interesting take on life, romance and relationships. It invents a ‘genetic malady’ that at first sounds like something that would afflict one of Marvel comics’ X-Men. After a traumatic event in his childhood, Henry De Tamble (Eric Bana of  Munich and  Black Hawk Down) begins traveling in time, with little rhyme or reason and no set timetable. He does keep returning to a figurative ‘present,’ only to be continually disappearing, dispatched to some locale in the past or future. He may be gone a few seconds, or long enough ‘to miss both Christmas and New Years holidays.’ Not only that, his future and past selves can time travel too. On a certain important day in his life, he’s replaced for a few hours by himself at an older age. His hair has already started to turn gray.

Don’t bother to try to figure everything out. 

Henry mostly remains as confused as we are. Of course nothing makes sense. Chicken vs. Egg questions pop up at all times. It’s difficult to nail down exactly when Henry first ‘meets’ Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams of  A Most Wanted Man and  Spotlight). In the show it’s when she’s a small child; when he meets Clare as an adult, she is the one to explain to him that she’s known him for years. Their life together is a jumble, for she never knows when her boyfriend, and later husband, will suddenly vanish, leaving a pile of empty clothing.

That repeated disappearing act sees Henry dissolving into nothingness. He is not a victim of  The H-Man; he’s somewhere else in space and time, naked and scrambling to find something to wear. He’s already developed burglar talents to find and steal clothing. Maybe that happens to you all the time, but most of us don’t find ourselves in that particular situation.

The only films blanc that really fail are those in which the technical flimflammery buries the human interest factor. Henry’s complicated situation at first seems unworkable, but the anxieties it creates soon grab our imagination. The ‘gag’ of time travel is never a joke. The closest the film comes to that is when Henry vanishes a few minutes before he’s due for his own wedding. The Best Man is about to have a heart attack, when a naked ‘replacement Henry’ shows up, unshaven and with a wrong haircut.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin and director Robert Schwentke manage an impressive adaptation. A synopsis of the original book reveals more characters and additional sub-plots that would be difficult to translate to the framework of a film romance. We’re given just enough technical time travel detail to keep the narrative upright. As Henry keeps reappearing in the same patch of woods behind the family house, Rachel always leaves a change of clothes for him. The beautiful woods are a private, unspoiled setting, that kind that only exist in romantic fantasy, or for magical encounters in a children’s story like  The Secret Garden. Clare and Henry even have their own ‘special’ park bench. It’s romance, ya know?

Don’t mind me, I’m Chronologically Impaired. 

When it comes time to actually diagnose Henry’s ‘interesting’ existential status, the movie brings in genetics expert Dr. Kendrick (Stephen Tobolowsky) to offer some nonsense about bursts of brain energy. Tobolowski is an inspired choice; he plays Kendrick straight and true, yet he’s so likable that we accept the genetics blab without question. Who’d a thunk it?  Kendrick has a waiting theory of a time traveling mutation, and Henry fits right in. Tobolowski played a clownish character in Groundhog Day, but here serves as an anchor for the science fiction premise. Dr. Kendrick knows Henry’s secret and does his utmost to help the couple.

The movie never doubts the ‘whimsical conceits’ in Niffenegger’s story, which sticks to the romantic and emotional throughline, and wisely doesn’t explain anything.  We’ve tried and failed to become invested in a few ‘time loop’ films blanc that are considered cult classics. Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time has many fans but to us comes off as thin and forced. Nick Cassavetes’ The Notebook also stars Rachel McAdams; it lays on the soft soap much too thick, and asks us to care too much about its perfect lovers. The Time Traveler’s Wife is equally confected & optimized, and it has what one would think to be an entirely unworkable science fiction premise. But it quickly wore down this reviewer’s defenses.

Perhaps the difference is just one’s personal reaction to the casting — if any reviewer achieves total objectivity, they have something we don’t have. Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana bring charisma to spare, and their chemistry is really strong. She has one of those winning smiles that melts the heart, while he is surrounded by an aura that says ‘nice guy.’ These star qualities are really needed if one is to throw one’s usual scepticism out the window and invest in such an undiluted romantic daydream.

Why do so many of these fantasies play out in a posh paradise of consumer affluence? 

Every film blanc tries to establish a baseline of normalcy to bolster its unlikely premise. TTTW follows the lead of The Notebook by plunking its characters into a prosperous world absent most of the normal issues of life. Racial and economic tensions are entirely absent. The main cast are all well off. Everybody dresses fashionably and everybody lives in to-die-for houses and apartments. (Look — Henry and Rachel’s dream house was  profiled online.)

Some critics that dissed TTTW as trite could have been reacting to its idealized surface, which is more cozy and expensive than your average Hallmark Channel Romance. The mansions, the Range Rover automobiles, the beautiful lighting of nighttime streets just glow. When the family gathers, the feasts being prepped in the designer kitchens are a Gourmet Ghetto dream. When Christmas comes, Clare’s cozy tree is as big and fancy as the ones they put up at The White House.

Henry is ‘unstuck in time and space’ but everybody else is an upscale professional: artists, doctors, etc.. Clare is a trendy artist, as was Demi Moore in screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s 1990 smash hit  Ghost.  TTTW almost feels like an extrapolation of Ghost — the husband’s absence is a daily issue, but he always come back. He revisits as a living person, not a phantom. And even being a phantom doesn’t preclude a visit or two. Henry is the Once and Future and Forever husband.

The film’s affluent surface and the lack of ‘everyday problems’ isolates and emphasizes Henry’s specific situation. When Henry must deal with traveling to odd places and times, naked and defenseless, he’s not also worrying about taxes or holding down a day job. He gets arrested and beaten up, and on one unlucky trip he almost freezes to death. But that episode occurs offscreen.

Talk about a relationship that’s adaptable — Clare and Henry do an admirable job coping with a ‘marital problem’ that yanks him away at any moment, with no guarantee when or if he’ll return. The problem of having children — Clare has more than one miscarriage — is handled with great tact. It also gets by thanks to the distraction of Stephen Tobolowski’s researcher Dr. Kendrick. His theoretical geneticist ends up wearing many hats. He handles Clare’s pregnancies as if he were an OB-GYN; to study Henry, Kendrick also serves as the tech operator of an MRI scanner. So versatile — 5 professionals in one.

Separation and yearning is the emotional basis for half of John Ford’s movies … do the same feelings work here? 

A synopsis may read as if TTTW is fantasy fluff, but it soon becomes something we can identify with. What ought to be trite reassurance cinema finds a secure emotional footing. The experience of Clare and Henry harmonizes with basic anxieties about loved ones — arrivals, departures, absences, estrangements; the inability to hold on to relationships we know to be impermanent — you know,  The Circle Game of time. We’re stuck in the tyranny of here and now — but what would it be like to meet our significant others as children?

These people end up talking to each other in the oddest ways — Henry meets Clare when she’s a child, much the same way that Eben Adams met Jennie Appleton in the classic  Portrait of Jennie. As an adult, Clare apparently first fell in love with Henry when he’s an older man in his ’40s. Henry never time-trips as a child, but his daughter certainly does. She appears to have more control over her inherited time traveling talent.

Sci-fi fans may be perturbed when The Time Traveler’s Wife ignores the Time Paradoxes that other stories work so hard to resolve. Henry says he’s discovered that he can’t change the future, avoid his own death, etc.. What he knows and what he doesn’t know is very selective, but if nobody has free will, then I guess nobody needs to study philosophy any more. We always become angry when a film blanc establishes hard and fast rules for the cosmos, and then lets our lovers break them because ‘Love conquers all.’ ( Here’s one.)  Why does Love only make things nice for attractive star players?  Both Henry and his daughter cheat by telling people things they ought not to know, and of course there’s that future-altering cheat with a lottery game. No Ray Bradbury  Butterfly Effect, apparently.

But the film stays in its very nicely appointed groove, sticking to the affecting romantic business. For us the emotions rang true enough, and with a touch of thoughtful reflection. We expected nothing, and instead got something in the plus column. A pleasant surprise.