back

The Time Traveler's Wife: A Muddied Emotional Point-of-View Robs a Potentially Lyrical Melodrama of Deeper, Universal Meaning

Rachel McAdams toils away in the thankless wings rather than taking her rightful place center stage of the drama.

The Time Traveler’s Wife would have done well to take a cue from its very own title and actually tell the story from the point of view of the titular character. It is, after all, her story – devoted Claire is the one who sacrifices her entire life for the sake of a man that can never give her the love she so desperately craves, devoted Claire is the one who clings to the idea of her one true love even as her life collapses into a heap of lonely disillusionment, devoted Claire is the one forced to deal with the reality of life half-lived as her husband roams haphazardly through time as a result of an unexplained genetic abnormality. This is where the meat of the story lies and it’s the only thing resembling a relevant metaphor to human, universal experience – how many of us have held onto a notion of love even after it has outlived its usefulness or redemptive capacity, how many of us have stubbornly lived for fleeting glimpses of grand romance when it otherwise requires us to sort through the muck of a relationship that simply doesn’t work. In Claire, The Time Traveler’s Wife has the opportunity to create a lyrical, surreal, dark melodrama about the glorious, addictive masochistic pain of holding out for the one true love that can never quite give us what we need.

And yet the creative minds behind this film adaptation completely forego this potentially gripping premise in favor of telling the story mostly from the point-of-view of our wearied time traveler.  And it is precisely at this point that the movie loses any kind of emotional relevancy or deeper universal meaning. You see, there is absolutely no mission or emotional point-of-view attached to Eric’s journey through time and space – a hapless victim of his own genetics, Eric haphazardly disappears and reappears with no known trigger or impetus, he wanders through each new time period with no direction, he simply waits for his genes to arbitrarily dissolve him yet again into a new time or place where he will once again wander aimlessly in wait. While this kind of vague, rule-less characterization bears specific emotional impact on Claire’s journey – it plunges her into a tedious romantic life of constant uncertainty and torturous impermanence – it makes for an altogether tepid hero with no clear thematic agenda. What is supposed to be a movie about anguished romance instead becomes an overly literal quandary about the pros and cons of time travel – we watch Eric randomly bump into his mother on the subway, we watch Eric beat up his aggressors attempting to take advantage of his disorientation, we watch Eric try to get to the root of his condition. And through it all there is really nowhere for Eric to go or progress – he’s a powerless puppet that lacks the personal conviction or dramatic spine for a meaningful journey.

This movie needed to take place squarely inside Claire’s personal hell: it needed to begin with Claire’s life as a child, with the emotional needs unmet by her self-involved parents and with the magical notion of a handsome older man who suddenly materializes to fill the void left vacant by her dysfunctional household; and then it needed to stay with Claire as she eschews other men in favor of her Knight in Shining Armor, it needed to show the growing obsession of a young woman pursuing the same fantasy that presented itself in her early development; it needed to allow us to discover Eric’s tragic burden with Claire – to sense something amiss with Claire, to discover his lies with Claire, to uncover the reality of his impending tragic end with Claire; in other words, we needed to feel Claire’s sense of wonderment, mystery and torturous disillusionment over the man she insisted on loving at all costs. In other words, we needed to see Eric as Claire sees Eric: an elusive, mythic paragon of romantic heroism who comes and goes with no rhyme or reason – a man who is there and then gone as quickly as he came – a man as elusive as he is immediate – a man whose initial perfection eventually reveals itself to be more draining than sustaining.  In this context, Claire becomes an evocative  vessel for its central thematic battle between the romantic fantasy and the grim reality left in the wake of said fantasy. Instead, the movie concerns itself with the over-complicated, logic defying jumps through time and subsequently relegates Claire’s dilemma to the sideline where it loiters in dramatic obscurity.

Directed by: Robert Schwentke
Written by: Bruce Joel Rubin
Starring: Eric Banal, Rachel McAdams

November 25, 2009