Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 27-November-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Somewhere in Time (1980)

Imagine figuring out how to travel back in time. You would find a place where the "atmosphere was aged," ideally a picturesque spot worthy of a long trip, and surround yourself with artifacts that spoke powerfully of the past. You would tap the faith to make the journey through force of will, convincing your brain that time is a two-way street which leads to yesterday as well as tomorrow. You would fall asleep in the present you had always known and wake up to the sounds and smells of another age. The location would be the same, but everything would be different. People would be people, but everyone would be fascinating. The world would seem familiar but nothing would be stale, and your future would look as bright as a newly minted penny.

This fantasy is the central attraction of "Somewhere in Time," although the rabid fans who maintain their devotion after 25 years will tell you it's the most romantic movie ever made. I too have loved this film since 1980, but I think even as an impressionable tween it spoke to me more of mind-romance than heart-romance. There is something deeply pleasurable about watching young playwright Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) fulfilling a painful wanderlust by checking into the gorgeous Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan, and immediately succumbing to an obsession with history. Like a biographer researching his own life, he pieces together clues until they point him towards a certain day, 68 years earlier, when he checked into the same hotel and found exactly what he was missing. Beautiful buildings, musty magazines, makeshift museums: the past is always speaking to us, holding the promise of answers. That thought just never gets old.

Not that I mean to disparage the love story of "Somewhere in Time," without which the historical component could not exist. The advantage that Richard Collier has over other would-be time-travelers is that he knows he's meant to inhabit a bygone era and knows exactly why: because a famous actress named Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) is fated to cross his path. Her beauty, blazing across the years in a yellowing photo, is what summons him back to 1912, and their first encounter is like pieces of a puzzle falling into place. The courtship is brief but sweet, full of gentle ardor on his side and tremulous desire on hers. (The costumes and Rachmaninoff's rhapsody add the finishing touches to their classic chemistry.) The chief obstruction to their happiness appears to be her possessive manager (Christopher Plummer), but his repeated intervention cannot check their determination to be together. Nor, it seems, can destiny, the only real obstacle true lovers ever had.

Like "Titanic," "Somewhere in Time" presents a potent combination of the glamour of passion with the glamour of yore (1912 must have been a very sexy year). Love and History remain constants while the human race abides, and films that recognize their seduction will ever entertain.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.