I’ve been quite taken by the Time Traveler’s Wife (The novel by Audrey Niffenegger). Which is why I’m writing this post – the film adaptation of the book has left me with a hollowness inside that the book did not have, even though I so enjoyed the film. So herewith my first blog film review. DISCLAIMER: PLOT AND FILM SPOILERS TO FOLLOW, please do stop reading if you ever intend to read the book or see the film. My recommendation is to read the book first.

According to Wikipedia, Niffenegger wrote the book as a “metaphor” for her own failed relationships. Out of which came what aspires to be a heady love story mixed with science-fiction. Not since Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass has such a blend of the realistic and fantastical appealed to me in the same way. When reading the book, I kept on thinking to myself “I wish I could have thought of this story myself” and “I wish that I could write like this!”.

Niffenegger’s Henry suffers from an involuntary genetic condition which causes him to spontaneously time travel to places and people in his life. Although Henry has no control of destination (or much else in his existence), the destination is not completely random and is often as a result of Henry’s unconscious yearnings.

It’s an ambitious theme to follow – and such a romantic one at that – when Clare meets Henry for the first time as an adult at the age of 22 she’s known him on and off since she was 6 and has an unquestioning certainty of their love. Henry at the age of 28 however has never met her before. It should be completely unfair to Clare, who after all never did have an opportunity up until then to meet Henry as an equal but only as a mysterious adult. It is unfair to Henry too, but it will be an older Henry who later on will go back in time and who will eventually meet up with (and finally seduce) the younger Clare. The book downplays the seductive element of it – Henry is given a free pass here as he lives in a deterministic universe where he is unable to change the flow of time or to alter outcomes. Or at least that would have to have been the defense in a court of law “your honour, I couldn’t help myself”. I guess one should lift a little scepticism here and just believe that it is all for the good, financial and otherwise, which is what I did and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. In many ways it strives to be the ultimate love story – in this universe it is as simple as the fact that Henry and Clare will love each other for who they are intrinsically, regardless of their lack of shared personal history or shared personal time line, and it is as if their love has been pre-written in the book of time.

The film starts by covering the scene in the book where Henry’s mother dies in a car crash. It’s a good starting point for the story-translated-to-script. But other choices made to translate the book into the film, although essential, feel like an amputation of the book. Characters are eliminated en mass (including all the black characters in the book, which I guess is not too much of a bad thing as they’re all servants except for the token Lesbian – hey we’re all equal opportunity discriminatory). One of the things that I was looking forward to from reading the book is seeing what the real world Newberry Library looks like (Henry works there as a librarian, and it is lovingly described throughout the book). But although I got to see the inside of a library (and maybe the outside too, I may have missed it!) I’m not sure if it was the actual library itself, and I never got to see “the cage” in the library – a meshed-in stairwell where Henry gets trapped due to his time travelling. The cage is such a strong visual metaphor, and I couldn’t help but feel that the writer of the screenplay thought it might be too strong an image for his audience. And therein lies the rub. The film has been cleansed and sanitized. It almost feels like the book was rushed too quickly into a movie, or perhaps, and this is my own bias showing, a director of the European school ¹may have been sensitive to which cuts were kind to the story, and which were unnecessarily kind to an audience deemed too sensitive to see the amputation of Henry’s feet.

I loved Rachel McAdams in “The Notebook” but in this movie she fell short of my own expectations of Clare. She was great, in a beautiful almost Angelina Jolie like way, and her character carried loads of emotional depth and a sort of unforgettable “shimmer” on screen, similar to her portrayal of Allie in The Notebook. She just was different to what I was expecting of a Clare, perhaps due to my own misreading of the character. On the other hand, there are some scenes in the movie that for me personally had a far higher emotional impact when seen on celluloid than when read in the book. And I’m thinking here of the scene where Henry meets his daughter for the first time and learns of his own death. What a tear jerker, I don’t know if it’s my own personal childhood losses that are being triggered here, or if I was being taken in by the universal chick flick. It could also be that the character of the 10 year old Alba so strongly reminds me, and I’m sure many others, of our need to protect our children from the uncertainties of life.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was the changing of the ending. In The Titanic James Cameron fished together a mystical final scene where the protagonists are reunited after death. Hollywood is quite capable of appending its own version of a satisfying ending to a story of disaster and tragedy. Niffenegger’s book too has its similar anchoring final chapter where an old Clare living alone is visited one last time by her “late” husband Henry as a much younger man. Inexplicably this too was removed from the movie, and replaced with a scene where Henry and Clare get to say good bye to each other at an earlier stage. Satisfying, sure, after all there is no long waiting suspenseful period, but it is somehow without the intensity and poignancy of the original.

What are your thoughts on the transition from book to film? Anything that you need to process about this film or book? Please comment

¹ The director Robert Schwentke is German, but is also Hollywood trained