Just watched...

..."The Time Traveler's Wife," released last year, and based on the Audrey Niffenegger novel of the same name.


This 2009 science fiction romance starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams is both touching and thought provoking, working quite well on both levels without feeling like a hybrid film of two different genres.

Bana plays Henry, a man who can travel in time. Unfortunately, he cannot control when he travels, the time or place he travels to, or when he is able to return. As you can imagine, this affliction makes life quite difficult for him. Added to this is the extra twist of being able to time travel only with himself, only his own flesh…he dissolves at random leaving behind a pile of clothing and anything he might be holding.

When Henry meets Clare, she tells him she knows him well even though at the moment, he has yet to meet her. It is his future self that has traveled back in time to visit Clare as a child and develop a relationship. Such twists in logic and plot require one to open one’s mind to the idea of fluid time.

Actually, all time is simultaneous. We know this. Physicists know it. Everything is happening at once—indeed, everything that has, is, or will happen has been done. There is no movement, only existence. We perceive time because we are in physical bodies on the physical plane. Once released from a body, we can perceive in a way that would shock us—and possibly drive us mad—were we to be presented with such a perspective while on the physical plane. From that place, there isn't even the idea of “simultaneous time,” but the absence of time itself. As I was watching the film, I could not help but feel for Henry who must have a very different perspective on life and the nature of existence. In a way, it is a sort of “enlightenment,” albeit a difficult, painful enlightenment to be able to perceive beyond, to have a bird’s eye view of existence. In the middle of such uncertainty (from a linear-time point of view), he is able to anchor himself only with what is important, and what is important is Clare. Of course the abstraction of that is relationship to others: love. There is a heartbreaking scene where Henry travels back to meet his now deceased mother (she died when he was a child) on the subway—he is only three years old in that time, but the adult Henry is able to speak to his mother as an adult and experience her presence and spirit. Such scenes and ideas bring up the reality of connections that exist beyond time or space. Our anchors, our reason for being here is the relationships we forge with others.

Recommend? Oh yes. It was lovely…