The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

Want to know the best part of The Time Traveler’s Wife? I could sum it up for you in four words: Eric Bana. Naked. Often. And now, if you want to skip reading the rest of this review and save yourself the headache of trying to figure out the grandfather paradox (and other mysteries of the space–time continuum) and go play "Brain Age" instead, you know all you need to know.

Adapted from Audrey Niffeneger’s book of the same name, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a willowy, weepy romance that’s part Quantum Leap, part Ghost, and part Lolita, but not nearly as good as any of those. Bana plays Henry Detamble, a Chicago research librarian, born with a genetic anomaly that has caused him to unwillingly travel through time since he was just six years old. He has no control over when and where he goes—only knowing that "big events pull him in”—and always arrives stark naked. On one of these little leaps through time, an adult Bana meets a young girl, Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams) playing in a meadow. Still naked, he so thoroughly charms her that she falls in love with him, even though she is barely old enough to know what that means. He visits her many times throughout her life and his own (he is able to travel to both the future and the past) and when they meet on the same plane of existence, they are already so truly, deeply, madly in love with one another that they sleep together on the first night and are married within the first 15 minutes of the movie.

So the audience doesn’t get the enjoyment of watching the love story between them unfold. I kept waiting for the time-traveling scenes to reveal a little more about when exactly Henry realizes Clare is the one, but the best explanation I got is that he doesn’t feel alone when she’s with him.. We also just have to accept that Clare is so enamored with Henry that she’ll put up with all of the inconveniences that come with a husband who literally disappears before her eyes and will be gone for days or weeks at a time. This could work if, when they are together in the present, there were more moments of tenderness and intimacy—like the pottery wheel scene in Ghost, for example—that connote meaningful movie love. Instead, scriptwriter Bruce Joel Rubin fast-forwards through any available opportunities to linger on simple, domestic bliss in order to drive the plot along (it’s Thanksgiving and Clare has just found out she’s pregnant). And director Robert Schwentke seems only too willing to have his cameras bounce to more time-traveling.

But The Time Traveler’s Wife is not a science fiction film. The sci-fi is merely a vehicle for the romance, a fact that is patently obvious if you try to wrap your mind around any of the paradoxes of space-time in this film. If it’s a genetic anomaly, why does Henry start traveling at the precise moment he does at age six and not, say, as a fetus in the womb? Are all of his leaps through time leading him to Clare? So why are there so many random, unpleasant bits of travel that have nothing to do with her? Is it really impossible to change the past, or does Henry’s intervening with Clare in the meadow do just that? Is there such a thing as free will or does it all come down to destiny? My head hurts just asking these questions, much less trying to find places where the film actually provides answers.

There were so many holes, in fact, that watching this film was like reading a good book (I’ve never read Niffeneger’s novel) with the odd-numbered pages ripped out. All of this is especially disappointing when you consider how talented, understated, and ultimately under-rated Eric Bana is as an actor. Even with his clothes on, he does the best he can with this flimsy material and, to his credit, manages to stamp out any lasting Humbert Humbert pedophilia parallels that seem ripe for the picking. But it pales in comparison to his haunting portrayal of Israeli assassin Avner in Munich; the irresistible, despicable aphrodisiac that was his Henry Tudor in The Other Boelyn Girl; or the way he disappears into the maniacal alien, Nero, in this summer’s Star Trek reboot.

In thinking about time travel and romance, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the out-of-time love story on TV’s Lost. There, the character Desmond compares his love of a woman named Penny to a ship’s “anchor” that keeps him from going mad in his skips through time. While The Time Traveler’s Wife tries desperately to be this summer’s sweeping, epic love story (it certainly looks the part in the trailers), this poorly scripted romance is too wispy to serve as a paperweight.