The Time Traveler's Wife #MoviesMall

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The Time Traveler's Wife is a 2009 American romantic drama film based on Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 novel of the same name. Directed by Robert Schwentke, the film stars Eric Bana as Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel randomly as he tries to build a romantic relationship with his love Clare, played by Rachel McAdams.


Of course, like every time-travel story I have ever known, from HG Wells's The Time Machine to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, the time travel plot doesn't make sense. What happens when the forward-moving present encroaches on the foreseen, previously visited or indeed altered future? Shouldn't we feel the "join", like a train jolting over points? Yet the moderate success of this film lies in persuading you, just about, not to notice those holes in the time-space-logic continuum.

Eric Bana plays Henry, an unshaven and agonised-looking guy who works in a Chicago library. Henry has a strange disorder, which means that he will unpredictably succumb to a epileptic-type fit during which he will vanish, and then travel backwards or forwards in time or space, usually only for a few hours. He crash-lands in this alien time zone, buck naked, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's time-travelling robot in the first Terminator movie, and has to forage for clothing as best he can. But Henry doesn't go far; he doesn't whoosh back to face down a T-Rex, or wind up nude in front of an astonished Henry VIII. (I have, incidentally, happy memories of the two travellers in Irwin Allen's 60s TV show The Time Tunnel, who would travel far and wide, for instance tumbling down on to an elegant cruise-ship and rather enjoying themselves.

No, Henry's destiny is to visit only those times and places of particular importance to him. And he repeatedly visits a little girl 20 or so years ago – while he is stark naked, you remember. He cowers humorously in bushes on her daddy's lavish country estate, and begs her to go and get her, ahem, daddy's clothes for him to wear. This scenario – unwholesome on so many levels – is repeated on various occasions as Clare blossoms into a comely young woman, played by the demure and not-too-sexy Rachel McAdams. Any dodgy or paedo connotations are cancelled, apparently, by the fact that this is the man she is destined to marry and so she does. For his part, Henry endures with stoic good humour an overbearing father-in-law with robustly conservative opinions and a love of hunting. But he carries on time-travelling, sometimes leaving his wife wildly in the lurch, zipping off into the future, meeting his only child and seeing his own all-too-imminent end.