Review of The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) by Mike S — 06 Apr 2013

Eric Bana - in all his naked splendour - plays a guy named Henry, whose bad genes makes him travelling in time, but only a few years back and forward and close to his original location. To make matters worse, Henry cannot chose where and when he is travelling, or how long he will stay. Finally, he is always jumping naked, so his first problem when landing somewhere is finding clothes.

A wet blanket of time travelling, if you ask me. As if this was not bad enough, Henry cannot influence events of the past, so he cannot save loved ones (or himself) from accidents.

One day young Henry, a morose, poor and solitary librarian bumps into Clare, played by McAdams, in the library. She is delighted to meet him, because she knows he is the love of her life. How does she know? Because Henry travelled from his future into her past and started seducing her since she was a child. What a sweet lot of nonsense.

From here, things take a turn from the worse: the SF plot converts into melancholic love story, revealing its true nature of fancy chick-flick. Clare is the rich princess and Henry the doomed prince. After several manipulative scenes aimed at tugging at our heartstring, our hero meets his demise. Clare lives on, ever slightly happy because she will continue meeting the dead Henry, still able to travel from the past to her future.

It is useless to look for logic in this type for plot, but I would like to mention just one enormous blunder: even if we are told loud and clear that Henry cannot choose when and where to travel, he reads Clare diary, so as to be able to appear to her when she is waiting for him.

So, this is the movie that ruined time travel for me. I used to find time travel fascinating: being able to travel to the past and see what really happened during controversial historical episodes. Or travel to the future and see how you children will live.

However, in this movie the only purpose of time travelling seems to be seducing children. Oh... and winning some money at the lottery, which is always welcomed but rather shallow as a purpose for life.

Bana and McAdams have chemistry and are enormously likable actors. McAdams overplays "madly in love". In fact, she looks merely mad. But not even the best actor would be enough to save this soppy love story.