Reel Time: The Time Traveler's Wife

This film adaptation of the popular novel doesn't deserve such bad reviews.

Our book club doesn't go in for the traditional assigned reading with postmortem discussions. Instead, we each bring in a good book from our private stashes, give a Reading Rainbow-style recommendation to the group, then pile up our treasures on the center table. When the coffee-house staff starts stacking chairs and closing up the patio, we sort through our riches for the loaners that most intrigue us. We read them at our own pace (no pressure to finish before the next meeting!), then repeat the process. The result? No one feels ashamed about falling behind. No one worries about a book not being "literary" enough. And we each get to read books we enjoy without having to slog through stuff that doesn't interest us. It's great!

With so many wonderful choices and diverse interests before us, it's rare that all of us will read the same book--but every once in a while, one races through the group like wildfire. The first time this happened was five years ago when one of us brought in The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. A romance with sci-fi tendencies was an unlikely hit for our group, but the characters were so well drawn, their experiences so relatable, and their situation so compelling that none of us could put the book down.

The story chronicles the relationship between Clare and Henry, a guy with a time-placement disorder that acts a lot like epilepsy. The result of Henry's uncontrollable time-traveling "episodes" is that Clare meets Henry for the first time when she's six years old--when Henry meets Clare for the first time, however, she's in her twenties. As you can imagine, this makes for an interesting relationship!

The film version opened last weekend to mostly mediocre reviews. Rotten Tomatoes lists it at 36%--a dismal number (though not as dismal as the 8% awarded to the animated Garfield a few years back). I'm not sure why the critics have been so harsh. Our book club saw the film as a group over the weekend, and most of us really enjoyed it. Sure, it doesn't incorporate all of the lovely nuances of the novel--but it was a fairly faithful retelling of the plot, and we all recognized the characters we'd come to love in the book.

Here's where the film got it right:

1. Casting. Eric Bana, with his troubled eyes and sexy hair cut, gives Henry the brooding, sensitive streak that is so endearing in the novel. He also spends a good portion of the movie with his shirt off (clothes don't time-travel), which is a crowd pleaser in a theater full of women. Rachel MacAdams is a decent Clare as well. She's perhaps perkier than I expected the novel's introspective heroine to be, but this makes for good contrast with Henry's more reserved character. The actors play wonderfully off of each other to create the tenderness between the characters that is so essential to the book. To the LA Times reviewer who said that the film's stars had no chemistry, I give a big whatever with a raspberry on top.


2. Production design.
With a plot that moves alinearly, it's vital for the audience to be able to follow the jumps in and out of the past without scratching their heads. The visual cues in the film are excellent, and each location is memorable. The set decoration is also excellent--you can tell from a glance at the decor if the scene is past or present. Also, props to makeup and hair for making it clear which iteration of Henry was appearing in the present.


3. Overall tone. While the two-hour film can only cover so much of the novel, each major plot point is present and, with few exceptions, these feel as natural as they do in the book. This means that the overall feel of the story is present in the film version. The tenuous, but loving, relationship between two people in an impossible situation comes through loud and clear, as does the theme of living with loss in its many iterations. Overall, it's a moving, interesting story.

That said, there are many areas where the novel excels that the film could not possibly touch. While the film was quite satisfying from my perspective as a fan of the book, it definitely is the lesser of the two works. Here's why you should check out the book:

1. A story for both girls and boys. The reading men in my life, including my husband, really enjoyed the book--something I chalk up to Henry's manly exploits in the novel that got stripped from the screenplay. The film version is definitely aimed at the ladies. You rarely see Henry's more dangerous adventures, and Bana's screen time is dedicated more to being a leading man than to being a guy's guy. But the novel's Henry is much more complex and interesting. He regularly gets into fights when he lands naked in the middle of nowhere--and he has to be scrappy and resourceful to get himself clothed and oriented between episodes. The sense of danger that pervades the novel is mostly absent from the screen version, which focuses more on Henry's complicated feelings about Clare. But even those scenes in the novel are infused with a uniquely masculine perspective that didn't seem to make it to the reel.


2. Parallel narratives. While the film favors Henry's perspective, the book gives both Henry and Clare equal weight. In the novel, one chapter gives you Clare's POV; the next focuses on Henry's. This back and forth builds the tension of the story--and it serves to make Clare as round a character as her time-traveling counterpart. In her accounts of her long waits for his return, her frustrations, and her worries for his safety, you also feel an unbearable suspense for Henry's fate--which is often left open at the end of his chapters. That subtly increased tension is an art that just can't make it to the silver screen.


3. Less creepy child interactions. In the novel version when six-year-old Clare meets a thirty-something Henry alone in a meadow, the creepiness of the situation doesn't really stand out. This is probably thanks to Niffenegger's telling of the story through Clare's childlike perspective to give the meeting a magical quality. The film version of this scene, with Bana towering over the child actress, gives it a much more Lolita quality--an ick factor that took me right out of the scene. It's too bad this pivotal plot point wasn't handled better in the film.


4. Character-driven time travel. Usually, I roll my eyes when I hear the words "good book" and "time travel," but this is a remarkable exception. At first read, the rules Niffenegger creates for time travel seem entirely plausible (they unravel a little on closer inspection, but they're still pretty good). Henry's "episodes," often brought on by stress, come across as entirely organic, which means that time travel in this case is not at all a nifty plot device. Instead, it's always a reveal about Henry's character. The movie doesn't really go into the logic of Niffenegger's time travel, a weakness that might leave viewers who are new to the material dissatisfied. The film also leaves out some interesting, and very human, interactions between Henry and his past selves (thanks to gintastic for the reminder!).

The Time Traveler's Wife (book): *****
The Time Traveler's Wife (film): ***