(2001) By a happy accident I came upon this sci-fi romantic comedy, which by its clever unfolding kept me slightly off-balance and guessing at the validity of the points of view, written, directed, and edited by Brad Anderson: "The future isn't what it used to be."

Searching for a balance in her life between concern for others and her own needs, Ruby Weaver (Marisa Tomei) tells her therapist, Maggie Ann Ford (Holland Taylor), treating her for a classic case of compulsive co-dependency: "It's not about me. It's about Sam."

Several months earlier she met Sam on a bench where he told her: "Your heart is like a clock measuring time, and one's emotional state determines the flow of time. It speeds it up or slows it down." Recently fired as a directory-assistance operator for taking too much time with her clients, she and her girlfriends keep a shoebox labeled "ex-files" of photographs of former boyfriends; Ruby's men have all been guys with problems she tried to fix. But Sam's different: "He seemed gentle. But I didn't think I'd see him again…. He was one of those guys you meet for a moment, but that lodge themselves in your brain forever. Better for fantasizing about than actually sleeping with. Better as mysteries. Because we all know what happens when you take away the mystery."

When he finds Ruby at her apartment, he explains that he'd traced her residence from information inside the book she'd left behind on the bench. In addition to speaking five languages fluently, Sam, who says he left his hometown of Dubuque, Iowa, three months ago, drives a van for hospice. Nevertheless, she says to her therapist, she was hesitant to get involved with him; but his "brilliant strategy" was to ask her how she wanted to be seduced before moving in with her within the week: "I feel like my whole life has been a journey into your arms."

However, she eventually recounts to Dr Ford - to her mother (Tovah Feldshuh) and her best friend Gretchen (Nadia Dajani) as well: "I started to notice other things" than his fear of little dogs, such as his talking weirdly in his sleep, spell-like trances, and "incredible genius" interspersed with childlike cluelessness.

When she discovers his notebook with drawings of a pretty girl's face with the name "Chrystie Delaney" rewritten repeatedly, she immediately assumes he's been two-timing her. "I can explain," says Sam repeatedly: the name is of his contact for assimilation upon his arrival as a back-traveler on the spacetime continuum from the future (2470, to be exact) and the portraits of her.

"I'm a Biological … just like you," says Sam, though after both his parents, who were rebellious Anachronists against the new order of "corporate-sponsored Gene Dupes," and his sister died, he'd gone to purchase a pistol to commit suicide to end his feelings of hopeless helplessness when he came upon the relic of her photograph, which gave the past a potential of meaning, forming a purpose of his finding the person with this face.

Using her leg, beginning with her big toe as the present, he demonstrates erotically how the present can be bent backward to lie side-by-side with the past. "It's a kinky role-playing game," interprets Gretchen: "Who cares? As long as the sex is good." Dr Ford has another take on Sam's freakish behavior: TLE or temporal-lobe epilepsy, which can result in the creation of elaborate fantasies; she asks Ruby to have Sam come see her for an appointment.

Raising Ruby's further suspicions, not only does Sam repeatedly change the particulars of his sad back story of the past (all he could afford) to explain the photos in his wallet as well as the events 470 years forward, he emphasizes how the future (at least theoretically) can be altered and bifurcated. His need for Dramamine is to help relieve him of the symptoms from RTDS or residual temporal drag syndrome ("the drag"), sort of like jet lag that causes him to experience brief moments of time reversal.

Yet her "morbid curiosity" holds together their relationship while her trust enables him to open up. According to Sam, religion was debunked in 2033 "when science discovers the gene that regulates fear;" in 2111 the world fought the petroleum wars followed by worse global catastrophes. Sam's friend Jose (Jose Zuniga), admitting he's journeyed through the astral plane, warns Ruby that because Sam has violated protocol by revealing to her his true identity as a back-traveler (a banned activity), he's in danger of being found out - "If other back-travelers found out, I dread what would happen" - further confusing her.

At an art-gallery exhibition of the canvases of Mark Paasch (Sean Gullette), Gretchen's boyfriend, Sam gets into an argument with Tab, a well-informed PhD and one of Ruby's exes, over the logical absurdities of time travel, locking events into a time loop of causal-chain repetition, which some people experience as déjà vu.

When Sam again changes his explanation to his having found her photo on a historical database of accident cases - "That's what I came here for, to help you" - Dr Ford, having met with Sam, tells Ruby that he's living out a delusional fantasy of guilt over his sister's death to atone for his inability to save her.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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