Time Traveler's Wife, The |
  • USA • 2009 • 107m •    • Directed by: Robert Schwentke. • Starring: Michelle Nolden, Alex Ferris, Arliss Howard, Eric Bana, Katherine Trowell, Bart Bedford, Esther Jun, Matt Birman, Craig Snoyer, Rachel McAdams, Carly Street, Romyen Tangsubutra, Brooklynn Proulx. • Music by: Mychael Danna.     When Henry DeTamble meets Clare Abshire in a Chicago library they both understand that he is a time traveler, but she knows much more about him as he has not yet been to the times and places where they have already met. He falls in love with her, as she has already with him, but his continuing unavoidable absences while time traveling - and then returning with increasing knowledge of their future - makes things ever more difficult for Clare.
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The cinematography by Florian Ballhaus is appropriately picturesque, and many of the characters are completely adorable, especially the few glimpses you get of Henry's mother, singing to Henry as a child with falling snow all around. Its notion of time travel is absurd, but it puts it to great use, following the effects of fate on a person's experiences.
Henry is difficult to track in the plot, but his love interest and eventual wife, Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams), is not. You see her as a child, a teenager, and an adult. The film follows Henry's story next to hers, with his parts broken into fragments and confusing time lines. Hers is a straight line journey. She meets Henry at age six when he travels to a meadow near her house. She helps ease his trips by providing clothes. His clothes don't jump through time with him, a definite side effect of time travel. He visits her frequently until she's 18, and they become best friends.
Time travel makes this romantic, fantasy story possible, but the movie doesn't make any attempt at physical plausibility. Instead, time travel elevates key moments in the story to focus your attention on the experience of a tragedy, made more intense the more it comes out of necessity. Fate is fascinating in that it has the ability to negate your immediate first person experiences of freewill (Henry isn't able to make significant changes to history). Freewill satisfies your momentary experiences and excites your sense of control and responsibility. Fate, however, does something just as interesting, if not more so. It gives perspective to all the good and bad things that happen at any moment, and suddenly makes them necessary instead of good or bad or purposive. In fact, fate makes your own decisions, which still always feel mostly free even if only falsely so, extend and unfold across the ages and, hopefully, beyond to some extent, but not always the way you want.
It also means Henry is more than one unique individual through the movie. He jumps from different periods of his life and as different versions of his self. For example, at older ages he leaps to his 5 year old self to comfort "him" with a blanket as he watches his mother die in the car crash. Apparently his ability activates in moments of crisis, emotional excitement, and drunkenness. Clare meets a version of Henry and they become instant lovers. Clare already loves him ever since she was a child and a teenager. He takes a bit longer to fall in love with her, making her explain what she knows about their history. After they get married, he jumps back to her childhood and firmly implants the idea of him in her. Did he jump to make sure the love of his life would go on to love him, or did fate cause him to go to her early periods and he merely interacted with her as demanded by the situation? These kinds of questions get some explicit treatment in the movie. It isn't afraid to ask big questions, but it won't wait around to hear all the possible answers.
One excellent answer comes in the wedding sequence, perhaps one of the best moments in the movie. Henry is so emotional about their wedding he jumps three times: just before they walk down the aisle, before they dance as husband and wife, and before they go to bed afterward. She's in a daze and simply accepts any and all versions of Henry. The gray hair Henry that marries her and the young Henry that dances with her. She wonders whether she's engaging in bigamy, but fate solves the problem because all the versions of Henry have a similar causal history. He can't significantly change who he is, so he can't help being basically the same person in all closely related versions of Henry. Perhaps this would change if he came back as a 60 year old man or if he jumped to her wedding as a 5 year old child, but those kinds of possibilities would disturb the romantic side of the sequence.
Fate is central to the story because it makes any particular action completely rational and understandable if only you could trace all its causal links back through time. It frees Clare from having to label her experiences as good or bad; instead, she simply accepts them because they are necessary and because she loves Henry. In some particular moments, she forgets this and they fight. Over time, she simply comes to love him just as he is and wouldn't have it any other way. All the good and bad things fade away; love and fate take over. Although she suffers from freewill withdrawal at times, she comes to discover the beauty of fate as so many other thinkers have done (Buddha, Spinoza, etc.). This also makes for a very tragic ending.
Clare wonders whether Henry is always with them even when he's not physically present. He is in the sense that she knows so much about his causal history and personality, she would be able to predict his actions in most any moment in time besides the extremes.
Review by ketgup83 [IMDB 15 December 2010] from the Internet Movie Database.
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