The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Is cheating on your husband with a future version of your husband still cheating?

The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of the weirder science-fiction films reviewed in this series. Not because it delves into strange worlds and exotic ideas, but rather because the story deals with the relationship of a couple disrupted by the constant, involuntary time traveling of Eric Bana’s character. It’s not the first (but maybe the best) romantic time travel story in the genre!

First Impressions

The trailer gets right to the point, a man who can travel through time (but can’t control when he leaves) meets a young girl and then returns to meet her as an adult. He asks her to marry him, which they do, but he comes and goes without warning leaving her alone. He returns at one point when she’s pregnant, telling her that he’s already met their daughter. It becomes an odd and lonely life for The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

A 6-year-old Henry DeTamble (Alex Ferris) and his mother, Annette (Michelle Nolden), are riding in a car on an icy road when they are sideswiped. Henry disappears out of the back seat as the car is smashed by an oncoming truck. He appears, naked, a few hundred feet up the road–and about 30 seconds in the past–and witnesses the crash from a different vantage point. An adult version of Henry (Eric Bana) appears and wraps young Henry in a blanket explaining that he is Henry grown up and has the ability to time travel. Adult Henry returns to his time in Chicago, where he works at a library. He helps a young woman, Clare (Rachel McAdams), who is excited to see Henry again–but he has no idea what she’s talking about.

The two have dinner, where she tells him she’s known Henry since she was 6 and he first appeared in a meadow by her house. Clare believes they’re meant to be together and brings him back to meet her roommate, Charisse (Jane McLean Guerra), and her boyfriend, Gomez (Ron Livingston). Meanwhile, Henry continues to randomly time travel, leaving his clothes behind and appearing naked. Each time he lands he must break into places for new clothes. He doesn’t feel like he’s ready for any kind of relationship. Gomez encounters future Henry getting in a fight and breaking into a surplus store, just before disappearing. Gomez tells Clare that this guy is trouble, but she says she has been waiting for Henry her whole life.

Henry time travels, meeting his mother on a subway car three years before her death. He relishes the time with her. Back in his present, Henry visits with his father, who has become an alcoholic since the loss of his wife, and asks for his mother’s wedding ring to propose to Clare. Clare initially says “no,” joking about imposing free will, but quickly says “yes.” At the wedding, Henry disappears moments before the ceremony and a future Henry (who is noticeably older) arrives to marry Clare. Present Henry returns at the wedding night but again disappears to visit young Clare in the meadow. She has left him a pair of clothes in the woods to wear (as he had requested his first time back). Young Clare is upset that Henry says he’s married.

After some time, Henry disappears on Clare for two weeks. When he returns he apologizes–saying he tried to get back sooner–and gives her a winning lottery ticket that is worth $5 million. They buy the perfect home together–one that Henry already knows which one it should be. One night a wounded Henry briefly appears in the foyer and disappears again just as quickly. Henry tracks down Dr. Kendrick (Stephen Tobolowsky), a geneticist that he knows will help him in the future. Kendrick tells Henry that he has an epileptic-like fit that causes his time traveling episodes. Clare reveals her pregnancy to Henry but loses the baby (and another) due to miscarriages, presumably because the child has the same affliction as Henry.

The couple is struggling with wanting to be a family. A strange young girl watches them walk down the street and gets excited. Henry secretly gets a vasectomy so as not to put Clare at further risk. He then travels back to see past-Clare, now 18 years old. They kiss for the first time from Clare’s perspective. When Henry returns and tells Clare of his surgery, she angrily leaves–claiming she never had a choice in this relationship. While out, a younger Henry finds her and the two have sex in her car, impregnating her. Henry travels some time into the future and meets his daughter, Alba (Hailey McCann) when she is 10 years old at a zoo. Clare’s third pregnancy happens without issue, resulting in the birth of Alba.

On Alba’s (Tatum McCann) 5th birthday, a 10-year-old Alba travels back in time to tell her that she will lose her father this Christmas. Henry is scared of dying, as is Clare. After another time travel episode, he returns with frostbite on his legs and is confined to a wheelchair. Knowing that his time is coming, Henry says goodbye to Gomez and Clare before vanishing. He appears in the woods in wintertime outside Clare’s estate, where her father accidentally shoots Henry while hunting for elk. A naked Henry returns to the foyer of his house and Clare cradles him as he dies. Four years in the future, an adult Henry appears to 9-year-old Alba and Clare to say he’s fine. He continues that they shouldn’t spend their time waiting for him and to live their lives. Henry disappears and Clare and Alba walk back to the house believing that he is still out there, in the trees, watching them.

“I have a genetic anomaly. It’s called Chrono-Impairment.” – Henry

History in the Making

The Time Traveler’s Wife is not your typical time travel story. If anything, it’s a romance film/love story with aspects of time travel, which stand in for other elements in the relationship genre, like infidelity or addiction. It is based on a 2003 novel of the same name by Audrey Niffenegger and was helmed by German director Robert Schwentke. This was a departure for Schwentke, who directed two films in his native Germany (one of which was a comedy) before coming to the States to direct the Jodie Foster thriller Flightplan. He would direct two other sci-fi films (also adaptations of books) Insurgent and Allegiant, the second and third films in the Divergent series. He was also responsible for directing the action films Red & RIPD (both adapted from comic books), and the GI Joe sequel/prequel Snake Eyes. For someone versed in more action-based films, The Time Traveler’s Wife shows an enormous amount of pathos and caring in the story of a couple working on their relationship as they cope with one of their partners having an incurable disease.

The film stars Eric Bana in his second sci-fi film of the year, having played the villain, Nero, in Star Trek–released in May. According to sources, he filmed this film first and then shaved his head to play the Romulan in Star Trek. When reshoots were needed for The Time Traveler’s Wife the production needed to wait for Bana’s hair to grow back as well as the seasons to change–supposedly to reshoot some of the meadow sequences. This delayed the film so it was released after Bana’s appearance in Trek. Opposite him is Rachel McAdams, primarily known at this time for her work in Mean Girls and The Notebook. This was the first of three roles for McAdams as the female lead in a film containing time travel. She would follow The Time Traveler’s Wife with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris in 2011, and then Richard Curtis’s 2013 film About Time, all three being romantic films that involve time travel, rather than pure sci-fi films.

Genre-fication

When audiences hear that a film contains time travel, it’s assumed that the movie is science-fiction. And why not? With titles like The Time Machine, Back to the Future, or The Terminator, most time travel films up to this point have been primarily sci-fi. Some films have been action/adventure films (TimeCop), some comedies (Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel), and even a horror film (Timecrimes). But very few have been romantic dramas. The best-known film that fits this mold is Somewhere in Time, in which Christopher Reeve uses meditation and concentration to will himself into the past to meet Jane Seymour, a woman he had seen in photos and become enamored with. While books, like The Time Traveler’s Wife, contain stories that fall into this category, films of this type are few and far between.

The movie adheres to most of the time travel tropes seen in fiction over the hundred-plus years of the genre, but not all of them. When Henry time travels he must do so without his clothes, like the characters in The Terminator. But unlike that film, he doesn’t strip in advance of the time travel. He disappears, leaving his clothes behind in a pile. Henry can travel forwards and backward in time, not knowing when or where he’ll arrive (so technically he’s also traveling in space). And unlike most time travelers he has no control of when he departs. He is a seed on the wind, destined by a force greater than himself. The Time Traveler’s Wife is not as concerned with the “rules” of time travel as some films are. There’s no one to mentor Henry about his travels, except his older self, who comforts him after his first leap. There appears to be no world-ending cataclysm of paradox by meeting himself, and Alda travels back in time several times to play and instruct her younger self without any consequences. This allows the story to be free to explore new territory, preventing the burden of adhering to other people’s rules about time travel.

Societal Commentary

As has been discussed in other time travel articles at Sci-Fi Saturdays, one of the main principles in time travel films is the idea of fate versus free will. Does the ability to visit the past or know the future affect the time travelers’ decisions? The Time Traveler’s Wife has a very clear answer to that, which is, “no.” Henry admits that while he can change the past, it only changes the smaller interactions, and not any large moments. He is unable to save his mother, which is the primary event he wants to change. The audience is not privy to these attempts and only has Henry’s word to go on. The film is decidedly fatalistic in its approach. When Henry first meets Clare, she’s unknown to him. But to her, this is the man that has been visiting her for most of her life. There’s a creepy aspect to this in that Clare is conditioned to accept this man as her soul mate. As she admits in one part of the film, she “never had a choice” about falling in love with Henry. From his standpoint, she came into his life willingly and accepting. From her standpoint, an adult man visits her as a child telling her about the life they have together in the future. It’s paradoxical and circular logic, but at least internally consistent.

What becomes abundantly clear in watching the film is that “time travel” is a stand-in for “relationship issues.” Forget that you’re watching a film that relies on a pseudo-scientific premise. Witness a man who leaves at odd times, remains distant and aloof, sometimes goes missing for weeks at a time, and think about what a normal dramatic story would express about these moments. Henry lacks commitment. Henry is having an affair. Henry is struggling with an addiction. One of the key moments occurs after Clare’s second miscarriage (in this case due to the baby time traveling outside her womb, but in typical stories it could be stress related). Henry decides he doesn’t wish to cause her any more pain, and gets a vasectomy–without consulting his partner. She becomes incensed by this and leaves the house. She ends up having sex with another man, which impregnates her. It just happens that this other man is another version of Henry. You can see how The Time Traveler’s Wife fits into the normal tropes of a romantic drama, but does it without the characters cheating with other people–only on themselves, with themselves.

The other curious question that arose while watching the film was that it was about the time traveler’s wife. Clare is reduced to being the spouse of the main character, which feels belittling. If her destiny was to always be the wife of this time traveler, she wouldn’t have any say in her own life. What does this say about the place of women in society? Is it commenting on the women who grow up wanting to become a wife and a perfect spouse, or does the film say that men assert themselves to make independent women dependent on the men around them? Think about that the next time you watch the film, and consider that the original story was also written by a woman.

The Science in The Fiction

Paradoxes are the nature of The Time Traveler’s Wife. What happened was not because of cause and effect, but because a character was informed about what was going to happen or what they were going to do, so they did it. On their first dinner date, Clare asks Henry if he’s started seeing Dr. Kendrick yet. She also tells him that he should drink less, since that may be triggering his time travel “seizures.” Later, Henry decides he should seek out Kendrick (played by Stephen Tobolowsky–a man who is no stranger to time travel fiction having been friends with Phil Connors in Groundhog Day) and explains to him the name of his condition–which Kendrick has not yet diagnosed. Henry tells the doctor what to call the disease, and how to look for it, so that’s what happens. Later, Henry meets his 10-year-old daughter who introduces herself as Alba. Henry then tells Clare they will call their child Alba because he just met her. Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg? In this case, it’s a Mobius strip of interactions with no clear beginning or ending.

The film creates a new way for time travel to happen. No longer are machines and tachyons, or faster-than-light slingshot effects necessary. Here it happens because the “clock genes” in Henry’s DNA are abnormal. The doctor calls it chrono-impairment (or rather he will call it that), which functions like an epileptic fit. Henry has certain triggers that can cause his syndrome to manifest more often. He doesn’t have any idea how to control it, but gets some tips from his future selves, plus Alba who suggests singing is a way that she uses to anchor herself. This is a fascinating, and entirely unique, method of time travel specific to this film only. How and why it occurs are never addressed and not as important as the effects and fallout Henry must adjust to.

The Final Frontier

The story of The Time Traveler’s Wife has also been adapted into a six-episode television series, which premiered on HBO in 2022. It makes for an interesting premise, and I wonder how different the series is at adapting the story into a longer-form piece of entertainment. However, at this time the show is no longer available on MAX, so that review cannot take place. Another adaptation took place in September 2022 when The Time Traveler’s Wife opened as a musical stage play in the UK. How many sci-fi stories have been adapted into musicals? Well, in this case, it’s probably more apt that this is considered a romantic drama instead.

This story was much more engaging and heartbreaking than what was initially expected. Bana and McAdams play the characters so honestly that watching these two characters who want to be together–that are destined to be together–struggle with communication and understanding of each other becomes tragic. It’s a story that shouldn’t work as well as it does, especially one that is not fully rooted in the science-fiction ideas it borrows from.

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