The Time Traveler's Wife: Love, Death and More Love
The Time Traveler's Wife" title="Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams share one of many soulful, doleful moments in The Time Traveler's Wife" width="307" height="200">
My friend and neighbor, the filmmaker Alan Wade, has a provocative explanation for why Titanic struck such a strong and reverberant chord with hundreds of millions of moviegoers, especially women: the hero dies. O.K., that breaks a cardinal rule of movie romance: that the lovers kiss happily at the final fadeout. Most examples of the genre end with that rosy image, in part because their makers are reluctant to bum out their audience. James Cameron must have been tempted to end his film with Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack surviving the ship's sinking and enjoying a long life with Kate Winslet's Rose. But Cameron realized that by killing off Jack, he was raising the movie's stakes from domestic platitude to classic romantic tragedy. Jack's death stamped both finality and immortality on the lovers' shipboard tryst. Because he is gone, their love will live forever.
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Storytellers from antiquity knew the power of star-crossed romance, and so did Audrey Niffenegger. Her 2003 best seller The Time Traveler's Wife is so plangent a tale of fatal love, with two adorable people fighting to beat the odds against them, that it's surprising it took six years for it to get to the big screen. Maybe prospective producers were reluctant to buck the prevailing wisdom of a conventional happy ending. Anyway, here is the film version, directed by Robert Schwentke. It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre, and there's a music score that tries to cue all the emotions in viewers, as if they're incapable of locating their own feelings. But the movie also has an aching solidity that allows you to surrender to its cuddly-creepy feelings without hating yourself in the morning. (See the best 1950s sci-fi movies.)
Henry (Eric Bana), who works in a Chicago public library, is in the reading room when a woman he's never met walks up to him and says dewily, "I've loved you all my life." She's Clare (Rachel McAdams), a young artist, and in her past — Henry's future — he has visited her and won her undying devotion. Henry, you see, has the gift or curse of time-traveling: disappearing from one temporal and spatial reality to pop up, naked, in another. This science-fiction trope will be familiar to fans of The Terminator, but Henry is no action-fantasy god. He's just a guy whose body has a wanderlust he can't harness. That's why, as he tells the besotted Clare, "I never wanted anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing." Of course they're destined to be each other's one and only loves. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)
Put a harsh light on the story and it's an old disease-of-the-week TV movie — if "chrono-impairment" is an illness covered by the Obama health-care plan. Henry eventually learns to control his ailment, to the extent that he can lurch back through time and meet Clare when she was a child. This is a powerful device: lovers often wish they could have met, or at least have had glimpses of, their soul mates in their youth. His time-traveling into the future also allows Clare to have an adulterous affair with her own husband. (It's very complicated.) But in a story that is unabashedly pro-love (and incidentally anti-hunting), intimations of human mortality will eventually complicate and enrich their relationship.
Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin has been down this post-mortem path before; he won an Oscar for Ghost. McAdams is also a veteran of a decades-spanning romance; in The Notebook she applied the same exorbitant dimples and loving laser stare she uses to excellent effect here. The role of Henry might once have been intended for Brad Pitt, who serves as an executive producer on the film. But it's well served by Bana, switching gears after playing the villain in Star Trek and a much less sympathetic wandering husband (for laughs) in Funny People. Here Bana hits the right tone of hangdog perplexity and stalwart romance.
In a film era that thinks sentiment is a big silly joke, The Time Traveler's Wife may be as out of its time as poor Henry. But for viewers aching for a romantic drama that leaves them emotionally, honorably exhausted, this could prove a total immersion in star-crossed love, if not perfect synchronicity. As with Titanic, the movie's fans could end up watching it time after time.
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