Based on the bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story about a man who finds himself inexplicably transported out of the present into other times in his life, and back again; the woman he meets when she is a young girl and his older time-traveling self appears in her meadow; and the life their more age-appropriate present selves spend together after she grows up a few more years. Born into a reality in which the normal rules of time do not apply, Clare (Rachel McAdams) and Henry (Eric Bana) strive for a relationship that takes its place alongside other timeless romances. Filled with messages from the future and intrusions into the past, it is a story of destiny, fate, and the influence of knowledge that reaches beyond right here and right now. But at the same time, while it fails to do so with the same emotional impact and connection of McAdams’ earlier romance The Notebook, The Time Traveler’s Wife proves that any destiny or fate that is actually of value is not just one that will happen, but one we will choose even if it requires a fight.
Because The Time Traveler’s Wife is far from a straightforward story of boy-meets-girl-and-they-live-happily-ever-after, a fair amount of the film necessarily deals with the logistics of Henry’s time traveling. The basics: it is something he cannot control, it can take him away from the present for nearly any length of time, and, at least in theory, it does not allow him to change the past. However, due to the fact that Henry mostly transports back in time, posing the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first is the fact that both Henry’s younger self and Clare’s younger self are delivered revelations from the life they have yet to lead before their present selves have even met and/or spent more than a half an hour together. When Clare approaches the thirty-something Henry and tells him he has to come to dinner with her because, well, they have been planning it for a long time, framing their encounter is the sense that they never would have met each other if they hadn’t met during Henry’s time travels before. And as the two essentially fall into love and life together with little question or conflict, ruling over their story is the undeniable influence of forces bigger than either of the two of them alone.
“It’s already happened; I couldn’t change it if I wanted to,” Clare tells a friend when he learns of Henry’s time-traveling and advises her to move on to someone else. “You think I wanted this life?” Clare asks Henry when they must deal with complications of Henry’s “affliction” that reach a bit further than just the two of them. “Who would want this?” But as Henry tells Clare, “You have a choice.” As Clare demonstrates when she at first tells Henry she will not marry him, there are not in fact cosmic forces preventing her from choosing anything but a life with Henry. And as both Henry and Clare face perhaps the greatest challenge of Henry’s time traveling they have yet to encounter and Clare tells Henry that she would not change a single second of their life together, the message is that destiny or not, the romance which Henry and Clare have shared is one they would each also choose.
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