Quick Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife

I will begin by just letting you know that I am really easy to entertain. This makes it hard for me to not enjoy a movie. There was something about The Time Traveler’s Wife that left me a little empty. After the movie, I felt a little frustrated and I was having a tough time explaining myself to Rachel when we were having our “what did you think?” conversation. I hope I can clearly share my thoughts here.

The plot of this movie was good. Original and touching. I really liked how they presented the story. It wasn’t hard to follow and the dialog helped at times when the guy was supposed to look older but didn’t at first glance. Rachel McAdams played Claire. She is the main love interest and proves to be incredibly tolerant and patient of Eric Bana’s Henry. Henry has the “ability” to move in and out of time and while he thinks he gets how it works, he cannot manage it and it happens at some very inopportune moments.

When he travels, he cannot bring along his clothes and he has learned that he has to be able to move quickly to find cover and usually needs to steal clothes. This provides some comic relief to the sometimes heavy story.

I’ll try not to give much away about how it ends but I want to address my main concern. He sees himself die. Through most of the movie, you don’t see many instances of him overlapping himself. He also mainly travels between the past and his present. This pattern is pretty solid until the end when after he’s dead, he travels forward and visits his widow and daughter. This is touching and all, but I found it very frustrating as in life and most movies, the surviving folks usually gain the most and learn from that person who died, when they’re dead. This movie shot a big hole through that basic element. Again, I understand that he can time-travel. But where is the mourning and lesson learning when the main guy dies but keeps coming around?

This is still a pretty good movie. I am always happy when something original comes along. In our current world of remakes and sequels, this is refreshing. I also felt that way about the family film, Shorts. But that’s another blog entry. My final rating on this is 3.5 squiggly left brackets out of 5: {{{.5.

-Timmy