The Time Traveler's Wife
Unfolding over the course of almost 40 years, The Time Traveler's Wife recounts a heartbreaking romance between two people who were always destined to meet and fall in love.
Unfolding over the course of almost 40 years, The Time Traveler's Wife recounts a heartbreaking romance between two people who were always destined to meet and fall in love.
Unusually, one is a time traveller who vanishes without warning - and then reappears minutes, hours, weeks or sometimes years later.
Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) is a perfect fit for director Robert Schwentke's adaptation of the bestseller by Audrey Niffenegger, which had readers around the world reaching for their handkerchiefs.
Rubin navigates the shifting time-frames with aplomb, using visual motifs to tether present and past, and he remains largely faithful to the source text.
Slick visual effects allow the hero to fade and then re-materialise in front of our eyes, leaving behind a pile of clothes on the floor.
The couple's wedding day is especially memorable, with different grooms appearing at the altar and the reception, where the band ominously bursts into Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart for the first dance.
The film opens in the late 1960s, when five-year-old Henry DeTamble (Alex Ferris) first experiences time travel, dematerialising from the back seat of his parents' car shortly before a truck ploughs into the vehicle, killing his mother Annette (Michelle Nolden).
The boy's father, Richard (Arliss Howard), is consumed by grief and Henry becomes estranged from the old man, coping alone with the Chrono-Displacement genetic disorder that renders him unwilling to forge lasting emotional connections.
Working as a librarian in Chicago, Henry (Eric Bana) meets a beautiful artist called Clare (Rachel McAdams), who stares at him with tear-filled eyes.
'You told me this would happen and that I should just act normal...' she whispers, unable to believe her beloved Henry is standing before her.
'I've known you since I was six years old, and you appeared in the meadow behind my parents' house,' she adds.
Fulfilling destiny, Henry and Clare fall in love and share his extraordinary secret with their friend Gomez (Ron Livingston) and his wife Charisse (Jane McLean).
Henry and Clare try to conceive but his genetic quirks result in numerous miscarriages, so they turn in desperation to geneticist Dr David Kendrick (Stephen Tobolowsky) for guidance.
The Time Traveler's Wife wrings almost as many tears as Niffenegger's book, building to a harrowing finale that proves while love defies class, religion, age and social status, it cannot completely transcend time.
For the sake of expediency, Rubin excises some of Niffenegger's novel.
Clare no longer has an affair with Gomez, keeping the central romance pure, and there is no room for a final reunion between the octogenarian Clare and her lover, presumably to spare McAdams several hours in the make-up chair.
The central pairing generates plentiful sparks of sexual chemistry.
McAdams is particularly good in a role that runs the gamut of human emotion, often welling up as she looks into her man's eyes.
'You're my best friend.
I've been in love with you all my life...'
Release Date: Friday 14 August 2009
Certificate: 12A
Runtime: 107mins
