Robert Schwentke (2009)
Some of the names on the credits help to establish it in the Hollywood tradition of vaguely supernatural love stories. Brad Pitt, with Benjamin Button not yet out of his system, executive produced[1]. Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Ghost, adapted Audrey Niffenegger’s hit novel of 2003. I suppose that people who loved the book may be able to get an emotional replay from the film. It’s harder to see how anyone not already familiar with the material could engage much with this wet and miserable tale. Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana), a Chicago librarian, has a rare genetic order which causes him to time travel. It’s one of those screen disorders that’s supposed to be ‘unpredictable’ but which soon becomes just the opposite, although one of the film’s few slightly amusing moments is provided by a geneticist (Stephen Tobolowsky) when he diagnoses Henry’s condition as ‘chrono-displacement’. In any case, the condition leads to considerable complications in Henry’s marriage to the eponymous Clare (Rachel McAdams).
The Time Traveler’s Wife begins with Henry as a young boy, sitting in the back of his mother’s car. It’s just before Christmas; the mother is a classical singer and Henry joins in with the carol ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ (the tune used for the English carol lyric ‘A great and mighty wonder’). The car crashes and bursts into flames, the mother is killed, and Henry finds himself observing the scene – then watching himself and his parents in a flashback to their happy home life. A man appears at the scene of the crash and comforts the terrified and naked boy: the man explains that there’s no need to worry – that he (the boy) is a time traveller and that he (the man) is the boy’s adult self. As reassurances go, I’ve heard better: it certainly doesn’t eclipse the upsetting bit when the distraught and baffled child reviews a past domestic bliss from which he’s now cut off (he calls out to his mother but she doesn’t see or hear him). But the whole sequence is confusing, especially in retrospect. It gives the impression that the chrono-displacement has been triggered by the road accident – and I never did get clear, throughout the picture, why Henry’s travels usually placed him in a scene interacting directly with Clare, either as a young girl or a grown woman, but occasionally had him on the outside looking in on himself and others. The script is similarly selective about Henry’s ability to pick up information from the future that he can make good use of when he goes backwards in time. I didn’t understand either how widely known his peculiarities were – or how Clare explained his repeated absences to her family and friends.
As that opening sequence with the undressed child suggests, Henry, whenever he goes on his travels, leaves his clothes in his place of departure and fetches up naked in his new environment. He can usually lay his hands on an outfit instantaneously but his predicament is used a couple of times for mildly comic effect. The effect is lame but this didn’t stop me thinking that the material was more suitable for a comedy. (The film could certainly use something like the Whoopi Goldberg medium in Ghost to liven it up.) Yet The Time Traveler’s Wife takes itself pretty seriously. It presents familiar indicators of a vanished paradisal happiness – Christmas trees, verdant meadows – in a visually idealised way (Florian Ballhaus did the cinematography) and uses its sci-fi basis as a peg on which to hang a maudlin romance. (According to Wikipedia, Audrey Niffenegger, ‘frustrated in love when she began the work, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships’.)
Henry’s ability to move in more than one temporal direction doesn’t help him avoid the normal human consequences of time. He dies and, although he can move to a point in the future beyond which his death occurred, he does so as a man never older than his early forties – the age at which his life ended. His mortality is oddly emphasised: when Clare says to Henry, ‘You’re going to die, aren’t you?’, she makes it sound as if this is his genetic abnormality – as if she and other people won’t have the same problem. As in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the medical implications of the hero’s complaint are treated in a straight-faced (and inadvertently funny) way. Clare’s several failed pregnancies are ascribed to Henry’s transmitting his condition to the foetus (resulting in a kind of pre-natal self-displacement, I suppose). To spare his wife the continuing trauma of miscarriage, he decides to have a vasectomy but Clare is then impregnated during a visit by a pre-vasectomised Henry and this pregnancy goes to term. The child Alba is diagnosed with chrono-displacement syndrome but we’re told that, unlike her father, she can control her travels. This sounds suspiciously like having it both ways (and if there was any suggestion that Alba disappeared in a way that caused her mother distress, I missed it).
Eric Bana is no one’s idea of a librarian and sometimes looks himself to be the product of a weird kind of genetic mutation – a cross between Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson with a bit of Richard Gere mixed in. Yet he has a good-humoured alertness and the ability to suggest speed of thought that none of those other three has. Bana’s strapping appearance is liable to get him typecast. This would be a pity because the contrast between his musculature and his quality of gentleness is distinctive. That’s not the word you’d use to describe Rachel McAdams, although she’s perfectly competent as Clare. All the children in the film – Alex Ferris as young Henry, Brooklynn Proulx as young Clare, Tatum McCann and Hailey McCann as Alba (aged five and ten respectively) – are over-competent: they’ve been directed to give performances that are too finished – and inexpressive. With Ron Livingston and Jane McLean as the couple who are Henry’s and Clare’s best friends, Arliss Howard and Michelle Nolden as Henry’s parents, Fiona Reid (the groom’s mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and Philip Craig as Clare’s. The eclectic choice of music, supplementing an uninspired score by Mychael Danna, includes a cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Broken Social Scene (who supplied the music for Half Nelson).
23 August 2009
[1] According to Wikipedia, The Time Traveler’s Wife was originally scheduled for release in the autumn of 2008. Although the article doesn’t suggest this as a reason for the eventual delay of nearly a year, it’s worth noting that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button arrived in cinemas late last year.
