Movie Review of The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger’s Bestseller Now a New Romantic Movie

Aug 21, 2009

Based on the bestseller by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife offers a romantic time travel movie about accepting fate and finding joy in life's moments.

Whether they’re comedies like Back to the Future or thrillers like The Butterfly Effect, most time travel movies have one thing in common – they’re about people trying to control time by fighting fate, changing history, or cheating death.

Instead, the film goes into the strange life of Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana), a man born with a genetic anomaly that causes him to travel uncontrollably to moments in his past or future. Yet while Henry can interact with people in these time periods, he can’t change history – including the death of his mother, which he’s witnessed hundreds of times.

Worse, every time Henry time travels, he can’t bring anything with him, even clothes, forcing him to resort to petty theft and violence just to keep from freezing or starving. It’s a lonely, harsh existence that’s driven him to alcoholism and isolation.

Not Like Other Time Travel Movies and Science Fiction Films

Then one day, Henry meets Clare (Rachel McAdams) a pretty artist who tells him his older self has been visiting her since she was six – and that she’s been in love with him all her life. As Henry accepts this unusual relationship (from his perspective, he’s just met her, from hers, she’s known him for years), he ends his self-destructive behavior and starts becoming the man Clare remembers – and the one she marries.

But being a time traveler’s wife isn’t easy, as Clare must deal with a husband who’s constantly disappearing, pregnancies that are challenged by Henry’s condition, and the disturbing feeling that their lives and deaths are preordained and absent of free will. As Henry and Clare live with their situation, however, they learn to treasure their moments together and realize that while fate can’t be controlled, it can still be appreciated.

Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams Deliver Good Performances

As Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife has been seen as a romance, a metaphor for distance in relationships, and an exploration of existentialism. As a movie, the story works best as a story about a couple making peace with a condition that takes Henry away from his family – but also lets him be there for them in unexpected ways. It’s not a particularly realistic film, yet its theme of accepting rather than controlling fate is laudable and a welcome change from other time travel movies.

While Bana and McAdams often look like the typical Hollywood “glamour couple” both actors turn in solid performances and elicit plenty of sympathy from the audience. Bana (who also starred as the time-traveling villain Nero in 2009’s Star Trek) is particularly good at creating a character coming to grips with both the joys and tragedies of living a life out of sequence.

Merits aside, the movie carries its share of flaws – ironically because it glosses over key time periods, making it hard to track character development. Henry’s emotional growth from depressed young man to centered husband, in particular, is more implied than revealed, as Bana does a good job of portraying Henry at different ages, but never gets to show how he got from one point to another.

The movie’s tendency to skip through time also makes it ignore certain subplots, including a potentially important one where Henry asks a geneticist to help him with his problem. While Clare claims the doctor plays a key role in helping Henry, this storyline is ultimately dropped and the audience never sees this relationship develop.

In general, however, The Time Traveler’s Wife does a good job of never straying far from its science fiction roots while not being dominated by them either. It’s a nice balance that results in a story about making the most of your life – even if you have to live it in an unusual way.

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