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Think of the logical, left side of your brain like a cell phone and put it on mute for "The Time Traveler's Wife."
Spend enough time watching horror or sci-fi films, and you may automatically assume the trick is on the audience and that there will be a heart-thumping twist near the end.
Is the time traveler a figment of his wife's imagination? Does she exist only in his mind? Or did someone conjure the two of them?
When the pair are seen and heard by others early in the movie, that theory is set aside for those who haven't read the Audrey Niffenegger novel. Can it really be about a time traveler named Henry (Eric Bana) and the woman, Clare (Rachel McAdams), who may become his wife?
As it turns out ... yes.
So that leaves a whole host of other questions and quandaries about what makes Henry travel, what its cost and danger are, and how all of this serves as a metaphor for folks whose hands and feet don't tingle in the seconds before they disappear.
- Starring: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams.
- Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, brief disturbing images, nudity and sexuality.
- Web site: www.thetimetravelerswifemovie.com/
Henry's declaration, "I've never wanted to have anything in my life I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that now ... I don't feel alone anymore," could be spoken by anyone.
Time travel serves as a metaphor for love, absence, aging and death, but once you see it on screen, it becomes real.
Henry starts to disappear, like pixels falling away, and then instantly vanishes when he travels. We spend too little time with him in other time zones although a couple of family reunions are especially touching.
The questions, however, start to bleat from the quiet part of your brain about how Henry holds down a job or why he and others aren't more interested in his forays to the future.
Directed by Robert Schwentke and adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin ("Ghost," "Jacob's Ladder"), "The Time Traveler's Wife" is engaging but not rapturously romantic.
Henry's hairstyles aren't distinctive enough to mark him as a particular age and, as in "Star Trek," characters briefly meet or coexist with their younger or older selves in a way that seems impossible or distracting even in a fanciful film.
McAdams has good chemistry with Bana, but it doesn't approach the sizzle she shared with onetime beau Ryan Gosling in "The Notebook." Brooklynn Proulx, who plays Julianne Moore's young daughter in "Shelter" (shot here in 2008 but yet to be released), makes young Clare nicely independent and intelligent.
"Time Traveler's Wife" is about a bond that transcends time, but I suspect the time spent with the book would provide a richer, deeper romance. As it is, "Time Traveler's Wife" is good but not one for the ages.
