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'The Time Traveler's Wife'

 

Somewhere in time, in a vault marked "commuter love stories: supernatural," there's a place ready and waiting for the hazy film version of "The Time Traveler's Wife."

Its best feature, besides Eric Bana's bum, is Rachel McAdams in the title role of the serenely long-suffering mate of a library researcher born with a dilly of a chromosomal irregularity.

 

Involuntarily, usually at inconvenient times, Henry (Bana) zwoops to an entirely different locale and chronological point in his lifetime.

Often he finds himself back at the meadow where he first met his destiny woman, artist Clare (McAdams). Sometimes a 40-year-old Henry drops in on a pre-teenage Clare; sometimes they hook up when he's in his 30s and she's in her 20s; sometime an older version of Henry counsels a younger version of Henry. Whenever he plops down into another time/space scenario he's naked, like a romance-novel edition of The Terminator.

Chicago author Audrey Niffenegger made hay on her best-selling novel, published in 2003. The adapting screenwriter is Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for "Ghost." That enormous hit's love-beyond-boundaries rules were relatively straightforward, however, compared with the dreamy, shape-shifting metaphysics of this tale.

Time travel is a funny business: It's nearly impossible to quantify the reasons why one gooey supernatural scenario works on-screen while another lies there, prettily. Why did the stage version of Jack Finney's well-loved novel "Time and Again" fail, and why hasn't it yet been filmed? In part, because it's not enough to have the main character put his hand to his head and "imagine" his way back to another time. No magic. No seduction.

Why does the film version of "The Time Traveler's Wife" struggle to engage? Whatever you thought of the book, Rubin and the director, Robert Schwentke of "Flightplan," bring little beyond dutiful craft and a mundane visual sense to the task of making it work as a movie. The emotions and crises feel pre-sanded, smooth to the point of blandness. The transitional disappearances are routine. One by one, the film's supporting characters learn of Henry's unusual circumstance, and then learn to adapt. Henry and Clare turn into a fabulous, if perpetually interrupted, couple. The stakes are never quite what they should be.

Rubin streamlines and revises Niffenegger's story line, removing a typical number of subplots (the one about Clare's abusive high school boyfriend, for example) for a page-to-screen transition. Every other line of dialogue comes with an explainer, and the verbal equivalent of a locater map, lest we risk any narrative confusion of the "Lake House" variety.

The cast is not the problem.

It includes Ron Livingston as Clare's best pal and Arliss Howard, quite moving as Henry's grieving father. Bana, like his co-star, is playing an abstraction, not a person, but he's pleasant enough company. And many women and many men consider him a lot more than that.

The only one to emerge from the sea foam intact, though, is McAdams.

Every scene she's in, even the silly ones, becomes better -- truer, often against long odds -- because she's in it. Her work feels emotionally spontaneous yet technically precise. She has an unusually easy touch with both comedy and drama, and she never holds a melodramatic moment hostage. Thanks to her, you feel for Clare.

Early on, Henry reassures her after a visit with a simple "I'll be back again. Lot of times." And rather than a shiver of anticipation, you feel like you're in for a bit of a romantic slog.

 

"The Time Traveler's Wife" Movie Trailer

 

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The Time Traveler's Wife MPAA rating: R (for bloody violence and pervasive language).

Running time: 1:52.

Starring: Sharlto Copley (Wikus Van Der Merwe); Jason Cope (Christopher Johnson); David James (Koobus Venter); Mandla Gaduka (Fundiswa Mhlanga); Vanessa Haywood (Tania).

Directed by Neill Blomkamp; written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell;

Produced by Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham.

A Tri Star release.

 

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