The Time Traveler's Wife Review

To be honest, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is so much better than what it seems like in the trailer, but to me, that’s still not really saying a lot. From I saw in the trailer, this film looked absolutely retarded; another boring, melodramatic romance. Plus, having Eric Bana as your leading man doesn’t really help the situation for me, because the last he was the lead in a romance movie (“Lucky You”), that film bombed. This film reminds of “The Notebook”, which ironically also stars Rachel McAdams. Both movies are about two lovers that are destined to be together, but certain circumstances occur where they can’t be together, or are together a short period of time. If “The Notebook” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” had a child, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” would be their baby. It has the true love aspect of “The Notebook” and the random time-traveling craziness of “Slaughterhouse-Five”. But in this case, the parents are better than the kid. “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is sweet and heartfelt at times, but the other times it’s very melodramatic and downright ridiculous.

I can hear my friends that are girls saying: Ridiculous? But, Adam, it’s a story about how love conquers all. It’s so sweet.

Yes, it has its sweet moments. I just said that. But I also said that after those sweet are over with, I’m stuck with melodramatic crap for another twenty minutes. After watching Eric Bana’s character trying to figure out where the hell he is for the fiftieth time, it starts to get on my nerves.

Okay, this movie is about a guy named Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) who’s born with a disease that causes him to travel time when he is stressed. He can’t control where or when he’ll go. He also meets a girl named Claire (Rachel McAdams) whom he falls in love with. They go through the normal marriage phases: first-time sex, marriage, kids, miscarriages, arguments, make-ups, deaths, and so on and so forth. The problem with their marriage is that he time-travels (a lot), and she has to wait for him to return for very long stretches of time.

I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints that say that this film has a very complicated and confusing story. To me, this movie was as easy to understand as “Green Eggs and Ham”. If you can watch “Lost” and know what the hell is going on, you’ll be alright following the story in this movie. Probably the scene that I liked the most happens towards the end. It’s very sad, and I almost cried. It wasn’t a “Wall-E” or “Up” moment, but it was very sad. And another thing I liked about this movie that every time I felt something for these characters, it didn’t feeling I was being manipulated. I felt a sincere connection to some of these characters. For us guys that aren’t really keen to these romance movies, there will be a couple of moments where you will laugh and crack jokes. There is one scene that had me cracking up, and it wasn’t intentional. It was the scene where a 40 year old Henry meets a 6 year old Claire. It might’ve been sweet in the book, but it looks like he going to molest her in the movie. The film has its unintentionally funny moments, so be warned.

One thing that terrible in this movie was the acting. Every time somebody opened their mouths to say something, it seemed like they didn’t give a shit what was going on at the moment. Eric Bana has been good (“Munich”), but he’s just bad here. He almost has one note through-out the entire film, and he kills some of the more serious scenes. I love Rachel McAdams. I’ve always admired her, but she gives one of her worst performances here. She talks in this annoying raspy voice throughout the movie, and it got on my nerves (especially when she and Bana are yelling at each other). She doesn’t do it all the time, but it’s painful when she uses that voice.

Overall, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is a surprisingly decent movie, but it’s far from great. If you have one in your town, go see this movie at a $1 theater. If this film didn’t have some of those sweet moments, I would’ve given this a much lower grade. But since those sweet moments are present in this film, I like this movie a little bit more than I thought I would. B-