Last night, at the behest of my girlfriend, I saw the steaming pile of mastodon dung known as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Going in without reading the novel, I carried several misconceptions about the movie. I will now disabuse you of any of said misconceptions that might cause you to accidentally watch this thing…
Misconception 1: The Time Traveler’s Wife is a Movie.
Fact: The Time Traveler’s Wife is a highlight reel, poorly pasted together.
There is no consistency, no narrative, no character development, and virtually no plot. The husband and wife only interact with each other in brief exchanges that resemble something like this:
McAdams: “Where have you been?”
Bana: “I’ve been time traveling.”
McAdams: “Well, shit.”
As you can imagine, it’s awfully hard to develop any characters or plot when the protagonists are only allowed to speak two sentences before one of them gets dumped in the middle of a bridge for no reason.
Misconception #2: The Time Traveler’s Wife is about time travel.
Fact: This movie has nothing to do with time travel.
It’s as if the author saw the movie Terminator once, and decided it would be super sexy to employ the Terminator rule that you have to time travel naked. Otherwise there are no rules. According to this movie, you can never alter the course of history as a time traveler (except when you do), and you definitely can never use your time travel powers to go anywhere interesting or historically significant. There are no parallel universes, time paradoxes, or Deloreans to be found. What Eric Bana does in this movie has nothing to do with space, time, or theoretical physics. It just confuses things to call this time travel. I prefer calling it, “Jamiroquai-ing.”
Misconception #3: The Time Traveler’s Wife is romantic.
Fact: The Time Traveler’s Wife is an allegory about an abusive relationship.
The secret about this movie is that its entire purpose is to give women a justification for staying with a shoddy husband. Think about it. Here is a husband who skips out on his own wedding (letting some older dude take his place at the ceremony), leaves town for weeks at a time, and holds no job. Did I mention that he originally seduces his wife when she’s nine years old and he’s forty?
His excuse for this? He’s a “time traveler” (Jamiroquai-er). Whenever he gets stressed out (or drinks too heavily) he “time travels” to a place of no accountability, where he’s compelled to pick locks, break into stores and/or apartments, crossdress, steal things, and spend the night evading the cops.
The time-traveling aspect is simply a mental trick invented by a rationalizing wife who doesn’t want to admit to herself that she married an alcoholic, distant man. This woman is in some serious denial. As are the many women who think they are married to a gallant, marauding, hero, who just happens to never be around. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid, ladies.
The only thing this movie succeeded in, was making me desperately want to time travel into a world where I’d left the theater 15 minutes in and snuck into District 9, instead.
