The Time Traveler's Wife (12A)

A film which many named among their favourites in the eighties was "Starman", a winning combination of sci fi and love story, in which Jeff Bridges plays a being from outer space, who adopts the form of young widow Karen Allen's late husband and wins her heart all over again.   "The Time Traveler's Wife", based on Audrey Niffenegger's novel, would appear to have a similar appeal, though in this case the sci-fi/fantasy aspect is rather less convincing and is more an original storytelling device to challenge the characters and reveal their love story,  

Henry (Bana) has a genetic anomaly, which cause him to skip back and forth inside the timeline of his own life with no control over it.   He never knows when he's going to time shift, where in time he's going to find himself and when he's going to get back to the present.   His condition also has the embarrassing feature that it's just his body that shifts, not his clothing. so he always finds himself naked wherever he ends up with his first task is being to find some clothes.   So we get to see a lot of the Bana butt.  

Henry's condition first manifests itself in the dramatic opening of the movie, when six year old Henry's mother (Michelle Nolden) is killed in a car crash and Henry (Alex Ferris) time shifts to earlier in the day, which saves his life.   When adult Henry meets Clare (McAdams), he is puzzled when she tells him he's been visiting her since she was a child and is her best friend.   He has no memory of those visits, because for him they are in his future and haven't yet happened.   The two of them soon fall in love and get married but life is not easy for the time traveller's wife coping with her erratically disappearing husband, who even does a couple of involuntary time trips on their wedding day.  

The logic of Henry's condition is tricky to follow and doesn't always stand up to close examination.   No convincing explanation is ever offered for it, nor for how two versions of Henry's one physical body at different ages can be in one time zone at the same time.   But the premise does work very effectively in terms of dramatic irony, emotional power and as a thought provoking meditation on the nature of time and its effect on our lives, drawing on similar ideas used by other writers such as J.B. Priestley in his time plays and the poet T.S Eliot -

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."   (from "Burnt Norton")

It also provides some often amusing moments - Clare as a child (Brooklynn Proulx) getting jealous when Henry tells her he is married, not realising that his wife is her future self - and some very moving ones, as when adult Henry meets his mother on one of his trips into the past.   McAdams and Bana both give good  performances, while Livingston as Henry's best buddy and Arliss Howard as his father, who is ultimately rescued by his son from alcoholic despair over the loss of his wife, makes a strong contribution.