Ordinary People

Forgive me if this is short, but The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to an elite crop of films that drain the fucking life out of me. Within ten minutes of the film starting, I knew this would be a difficult slough. The opening scene could have kicked off with a terrifying sense of predetermined tragedy, like flying a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall that you can see from a mile away.

Instead, let me illustrate the opening scene. Young Henry is riding in the back seat of his mother's car. They're enjoying the December evening and singing Christmas songs like happy mothers and sons do. In the distance we see a truck swerving. Panic fills the atmosphere as Henry's mother tries to get off the road. Suddenly, something starts to happen to Henry. He's disappearing. The young actor looks panic-stricken, his mother unable to handle the unfolding crises. Suddenly it's two weeks earlier. Henry is standing naked in his living room, looking at himself sitting on the couch with his mother and father. The camera does a lovely pan around the room. Henry begins to disappear again. He reappears on the snowy side of the road in time to see his mother's car hit the truck and erupt like a fucking volcano. Henry screams out for his mother, but he's grabbed from behind by a stranger. It is Henry as an older man with a ridiculous hair cut and an American accent wholly unconvincing. Eric Bana, you just got that much more difficult to defend. He tells young Henry that there's nothing he can do to save his mother and then begins to disappear.

What a great scene, right? WRONG. This scene could have been edited together with sharpness and punch, it could have been horrifying and tragic. Instead it's flabby and poorly conceived, as if every shot in the sequence has just one fatal error, one badly constructed idea. Like inserting useless CGI, or having the car erupt like a fucking volcano, or the part where Future Henry arrives with his shaved head and tattoos and space ship.

There's no doubt that this film aimed for Epic Romance, and like all 19-year-old dudes, I like myself an Epic Romance. I was quite taken with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year if for no other reason than I hadn't seen a well-made, well-acted film of the Epic Romance variety in a while, and it gives me a good reference point on why this film can go to hell.

First and foremost, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was about Benjamin's arc. We caught glimpses of Daisy's arc across her life span, and that gave the film an epic feel. Second, Curious Case was about the gravity that brought Benjamin and Daisy back together time and time again, but how their young foolishness threw the relationship away over and over again until they were in their 40's. In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry and Clare get together in the first scene they meet. What's left? I'll TELL you what's next: boring relationship turmoil. Will they ever decide on a name for their kid? Are they going to have pork chops or garden salads for dinner tonight? Whoops, Henry time-traveled. I'll put his dinner in the refrigerator in case he comes back tonight. YAWN.

But what's the most important part about a romance? The fucking romance. Nothing romantic ever happens and the time traveling adds nothing to their relationship. They don't feel like soulmates, they feel like an average married couple stuck in a freshman English major's wet dream. All they ever do is talk about how they're soulmates instead of demonstrating it like a proper romance does.

Maybe the writing could have worked if the actors had been better, but I doubt it. Rachel McAdams does little more than stand around and look pretty and be static and boring, while Eric Bana gives the worst performance I think I've seen all summer. After I was such a big fan of him in Star Trek (apparently the only big fan of him in Star Trek) and Funny People, he seems to be working hard to undo all my praise.

The dude looks completely out of place in the real world. He's too damn pretty. He looked perfect as an evil Romulan general, or an over-confident yuppie, but standing there with normal people pretending to be a normal person, he doesn't look right. And his accent. Jesus fucking Christ his accent. I loved his accent in Munich. I loved the holy hell out of his speech patterns in Star Trek, and I thought his Australian accent gave him an air of innocent intimidation in Funny People. But holy dicks is this thing putrid. It never gets better and I never was able to tune it out. It's just a grating American accent from someone who is quite clearly not an American.

The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that it's prettier than it should be. I just don't even want to write this anymore. I don't want to look it over it or copy-edit it. I just want to be done with it and write a bunch of articles as fast as humanly possible so that I can bury this entry and never have to think of this movie again.

2/10