I was one of perhaps only a handful of men who fell, totally, for the tear-inducing charms of Time Traveller’s Wife, (I’m sorry. There really must be 2 “Ls” in traveller,) when I read the novel some years ago. It combined the gorgeous sun-soaked wishy-washyness of a Maeve Binchy novel with the heart-ripping loss of Romeo and Juliet - a romantic classic, finely and precisely crafted - I suspect over years and multiple iterations, by, literally, an expert artist. (Audrey Niffeneger is an artist first, a novelist second.)
The film certainly has the hue. Every colour is overblown, over-saturated beautifully. Similar the soundtrack offers a soft bed of late summer leaf fall, thick with multi-layered strings. Whilst not personally interested in Eric Bana’s behind, I can imagine this would also be of interest to the majority of the market for the movie!
The paradox of the story, of course, is that both the chicken and the egg arrived together - time in this cleverly plausible almost-reality is a moebus strip. When Clare meets Henry for the first time, he already knows they’ll meet, fall in love and marry. When Henry meets Clare for the first time, she has loved him since she was a child. The scriptwriter teases us with this just once - Henry tells the doctor “You call the condition Chrono-displacement, but now I’ve told you that, its difficult to know what comes first…”
No other review I’ve read (they’re all here on Rotten Tomatoes by the way,) really seems to have identified, and accepted, this ultimate paradox.
Finally, for me, though, the leading actors didn’t quite click. They were best friends certainly, but seemed to fall into the mildly embarassing “how do I tell my best friend I love her?” category rather than the out & out passion than Niffeneger portrays so sensitively.
And to cut the final, (in Clare’s chronology at least,) scene was a travesty. Henry re-visits Clare when she’s an old woman. That was the one that had me red-eyed for days, and is making me well up just thinking about it again. That scene embodied the magic of the paradox most beautifully, but they cut it completey from the movie. Boo, but considerably less hoo.
Afterwards? We got home not so much with the overwhelming need to rip up the bed, but instead to cuddle the sleeping kids, then each other. That was nice for sure, but not the expected outcome!
Enjoyable enough but middling. A tough book to translate to the screen, certainly. Nevertheless, a mild shame.
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