August 18, 2009 -- This tale of time travel is agreeable enough as a romance, but it takes itself way to seriously for a film with such a silly plot. It also argues that two incompatible positions on destiny (or fate) are true. Pick a side and stick to it. You can't have it both ways. You either have free will or you don't. You either can use knowledge of future events to change events in the past, or you can't. This film tries to say that destiny is immutable, but then allows instances where it isn't. The two positions are mutually exclusive, but the screenplay tries to have it both ways. More on this dilemma in the spoiler section below.

Henry DeTamble, the time traveler, is played by Eric Bana of “Star Trek.” He begins time traveling as a youngster. He simply vanishes and appears in another time, the future or past. He has no control over time travel, and when he travels, he arrives stark naked. This is terribly inconvenient. The film attempts to explain time travel with some mumbo-jumbo about Henry's “clock genes” being out of whack. This makes no sense, but then being able to time travel and not being able to take advantage of knowledge of future events makes no sense either. There is only one instance in the whole movie where Henry takes advantage of his knowledge of the future. Most of the time, he's just a helpless, whiney, wimpy victim of fate.

Things pick up when Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams of “State of Play”) arrives on the scene. The romance between Clare and Henry clicks, as does their relationships with their parents and friends. Most of the time the time travel bit is just a distraction from this romance and these relationships. From time to time, however, time travel introduces some interesting elements into the movie, like when Henry meets someone as a child who he has known as an adult. In one touching scene, he meets his mother as an adult time traveler, even though she died when he was a child. Even death doesn't completely stop a frequent time traveler. The film also explores the “paradox of duplication” where a time traveler can meet himself at another point during his life perhaps to convey more useless information about the future. Time travel is an interesting plot device, even when it doesn't work well. It works just barely well enough in this movie. This film rates a C+.

As I've noted in numerous essays and reviews before, Hollywood loves the idea of an immutable destiny. This is actually an old-fashioned mechanistic view of the world which predates such modern concepts as quantum mechanics, string theory, chaos theory and the uncertainty principle. The idea of immutable destiny is that things have to turn out the way they turn out no matter what. There is a cause to every effect going back to the beginning of the big bang. Even if you can time travel, you can't go back and stop the bullet that killed Kennedy or the planes that hit the World Trade Centers. That stuff is going to happen anyway. It is inevitable fate. “The Time Traveler's Wife” is built on this premise. Henry watches helplessly numerous times as his mother dies in a car crash. He discovers the time of his own death in a hunting accident, but can't stop that either. The problem is, the film is not consistent in this view. It also shows an instance where Henry does change his family's fate in a significant way by using his knowledge of the future.

Henry uses his knowledge of the future to buy a winning $5 million lottery ticket. If Henry can't prevent his mother's death, or his own, he shouldn't be able to win the lottery either. His ability to win the lottery proves he can change the course of history in a significant way. He is not a helpless viewer of events, but an active participant. Think how easy it would be for Henry to prevent his mother's death. It is far easier than remembering all the lottery numbers and buying a ticket before the deadline. All he has to do is delay his mother's departure from the house by a few seconds to prevent the fatal car crash. I guarantee you if a naked man knocks on your door just as you are getting ready to leave, it will delay you a few seconds, more likely a few minutes. It would be even easier for Henry to avoid his own death, since his daughter, also a time traveler, can help him get the information on the exact day and time he travels back. She even has the power to witness the event. Unlike Henry, she has the ability to control when and where she time-travels. She can simply tell her father to lay down flat so the bullet will pass over him harmlessly (he gets shot while sitting up), or she can time travel to the event itself and shout at her grandfather, “don't shoot or you'll kill my father!” That ought to give the hunter pause. By the way, Henry's daughter also has the power to prevent her grandmother's death in the car accident. The story insists that both Henry and his daughter are helpless to prevent these accidental deaths, and that is pure bull. They are simply slaves to a stupid plot.

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Copyright © 2009 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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