The Time Traveler's Wife

With its genre-mixing blend of sci-fi and weepy romantic drama, I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise "The Time Traveler's Wife" came and went with hardly a batted eye.

It's a shame, because as it turns out it's actually a pretty intelligent and engaging film, going light on the mechanics of time travel and focusing on the relationship between Claire Abshire (Rachel McAdams) and Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana), the title character and her beau, who literally pops in and out of her life.

All we know about the time travel is that Henry has some sort of genetic disorder that causes him to spontaneously, uncontrollably bounce through time. There are grumblings that television signals and drinking may trigger a time shift, but there's no real rhyme or reason to it. His first shift occurs just as his mother is killed in a car accident.

The only common thread to Henry's time shifting is Claire, whom he meets at different points of her life.

The story itself is both simple and complicated, but captures well the vagaries of living life in this manner. When he shifts, Henry's clothes do not go with him, so he appears in the new time frame nude, forcing him to beg, borrow or steal clothes. And if he appears in winter (or in public) there are potentially deadly consequences.

Claire, meanwhile, has to live stretches of her life not knowing when her husband will come back into her life, or how long he'll be there when he appears (at one point he shifts as he's walking to the dinner table with his plate), or even how old he'll be when he arrives: in one sequence, on their wedding day, Henry disappears just before he's to walk down the aisle. his best man (Ron Livingston) panics, only to see Henry knocking on the window with streaks of gray in his hair.

Then there's another scene, where Claire cheats on her husband with...her husband, having an in-vehicle quickie with a younger version of her husband who pops into her life as he simultaneously is at home sleeping (this is also part of a rather nifty thread in the narrative that I don't want to spoil).

Most of these questions aren't fully explored, but as at its heart this is unabashedly a romantic drama, they're not really that important. There are no ruminations on the space-time continuum or theories on how knowing the future will destroy it (though Henry does note that he has tried changing certain events in his life, but is never successful).

The romance is actually pretty well done. McAdams and Bana are certainly a pretty enough couple, and they work well together, whether they're savoring their time together or fighting through it (and really, how much would you fight if one of you had a condition like this?).

There are scenes when Henry meets Clare as a child that could be potentially creepy, but they manage to skirt that issue, and it's fun to see them talk about fights, discussions and events that, for one of them, may have happened years before or haven't even occurred yet.

And "Traveler's" final success is in the weepy part at the end, not shying away from the large looming potential plot hole that could torpedo a film like this, leaving us to ponder an end result that could be equal parts gift and curse.

The DVD extras include a commentary from Bana, McAdams and director Robert Schwentke, and a standard featurette.

Film: 4 Yaps Extras: 3 1/2 Yaps