Saw a screening of "The Time Traveler's Wife" tonight.

A romantic drama with gorgeous leads and fabulous set design (I do really love it when people live in homes that looks like homes which people would live in -- let alone the characters in the film would live in, so kudos for that) and lovely cinematography.

But my problems with the film involve major spoilers, so if you object to that, then read no further.

The time traveler, Henry, disappears without rhyme or reason, so abruptly that his clothes crumple to the floor and he arrives at his next spot on the time-space continuum stark naked, at which point hijinks invariably ensue.

In fact, when he first meets his future wife Claire, she is a six year old child playing alone in a meadow and he is a naked grown man speaking to her from the bushes, hardly a promising premise for an epic love story. He repeatedly encounters her as a child, and as a teenager, but he is always an adult. He is always Eric Bana. "You took the heart and mind of a little girl," she says to him in their one serious fight, which elicits from him a puppy-eyed frown of sadness.

One personal frisson of pleasure for me: the song that they dance to at their wedding (on the meadow where they met) is a spooky-sad rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Pedophilia, and all practicalities aside -- the movie is definitely going for magic realism, so questions about how he could obtain and keep a job, let alone a relationship, will remain questions -- the bottom line is that Henry being a time-traveler is a situation, not a story. His condition needs to have a purpose, a crux, a crisis. Without it, he's just a guy who gets around a lot.

Labels: The Time Traveler's Wife

posted by Elizabeth at 12:07 AM