The Time Traveller’s Wife

What do you do when you meet the love of your life when you’re six years old and he’s 36? If you’re Clare Abshire, you wait for each of his visits throughout the years until you meet him in real time. She has no choice because she has fallen in love with this dashing time traveler, Henry.

Henry DeTamble was born in 1963 with a genetic impairment that allows him to travel through time unwillingly. He finds out about his ability when he ‘disappears’ from the car accident which kills his mother on Christmas Eve.

A well-educated man, Henry works as a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he meets the beautiful Clare when she is twenty while he is twenty-eight but he has no idea who she is. Slowly, she begins to tell him of her past and how he traveled to the meadow behind her house to see her.

Before long they are married. Clare tries to survive the reality of having a time traveler for a husband. How it feels when he leaves and not knowing when he will return. Sounds like a normal relationship, doesn’t it? Yes, an absent man in a relationship is pretty common.

But the fact that Henry cannot control when or where he goes and comes back bringing bodily injuries he’s suffered, makes us feel for him. Eric Bana plays Henry superbly. Of course I’m a bit biased as I had already fallen for him when he played Prince Hector in Troy.

Suave and charismatic with his soft wavy hair, Bana is transformed from a younger to an elder version of himself as he travels through time copious times, visiting his parents and Clare like a magnet throughout her younger years.

Clare is played by Rachael McAdams. Although Bana and McAdams are good together, the movie is more of what and how Henry feels and goes through rather than the time traveler’s wife. We don’t really see or feel her suffering, her devastation, her struggle.

What I did feel is how much Henry loves Clare throughout his spontaneous travel through time, disappearing from view, leaving behind his clothes and possessions, and arriving naked in another time and another place. For the most part, this is a curse for Henry although Bana does look good in the flesh!

The Time Traveler’s Wife is based on a best-seller by Audrey Niffeneggar. Since the book is close to 600 pages, it would have been difficult to capture Henry and Clare’s passionate love affair that endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap. An enchanting debut for Niffeneggar which tells the tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love.