Review

Review Date: 16-August-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

At some point along its delayed route to the screen The Time Traveler's Wife must have been slated for a Christmas release. The movie opens and closes during the holidays, showing how a boy lost his mother and took his first leap through time at the same moment, then how the man he became concluded his strange journey with the woman who loved him all her life. In between the picture delivers the mistletoe message that precious moments make life worth living even when interspersed with heartache. Especially in that wondrous Hollywood land where everyone is beautiful and lives in a fabulous home.

Greeting card philosophy is not my favorite, but I like the idea of time travel even without historical mystique. The chronology here spans a single modern lifetime. The traveler (Eric Bana) cannot control his jumps; he just vanishes from one point and appears in another, inconveniently without his clothes. He does this throughout his life, always arriving nearby the people who influence its course. His wife (Rachel McAdams) first meets him when he is around forty and she only six, and she grows up with him before her like a beacon. They come together when she is an adult, after which she shares the difficulties of his unusual situation.

The movie sidesteps a number of these difficulties, like how often he must have been arrested for public nudity, how his nerves must have been shot anticipating the next jump, and how many heart attacks and conspiracy theories he must have caused by disappearing before witnesses. It also deals cavalierly with his inability to hold a job, pausing to show the couple using his knowledge of the future to win the lottery. One interesting notion that the movie does explore is one which some time-travel tales do not, namely that he can visit different versions of himself coexisting at a single time and place.

If the movie's consideration of time travel is alternately simplistic and intriguing, Bana and McAdams are engaging enough to legitimize the lovers' personal problems. These stem not only from his absences but also from several miscarriages possibly caused by the fetus attempting to jump through time like its father. (Don't think about that too much.) Ultimately his oddity does not define their life together but throws it into perspective. This is the appeal of the story which average people can take to heart, that frustrations can impede but not prevent the achievement of happiness.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.