In the end though I needn’t have worried because the studio has done a bit of dumbing down of the story, which meant I didn’t get lost at all but the movie clearly suffered at the hands of this tampering.
At the start we see Henry, the time travelling librarian, at the age of six in a car with his mother. The car gets shunted and this triggers Henry into a time jump, his first. Seconds later, he is back in the present but standing at the road side as the car driven by his mother crashes into a lorry.
His elder self appears alongside him to comfort him and to reassure him about all this time jump malarkey. Henry has a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, involuntarily jumping back and forth through time. He can’t control it and has no idea when he’s going to travel or where to, except that it often seems to be triggered by stress, and that he usually travels to places related to his life, just at a different time. This could of course all just be a great ruse and an excuse for nipping down the pub when his misses isn’t looking but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. A slight inconvenience is that he never gets to take anything with him and so arrives stark naked, meaning that his first task is always finding something to wear.
In the next scene, the grown up Henry (Eric Bana) is at work in the library when he is approached by Clare (Rachel McAdams). He’s never met her before but this babe declares undying love for him. No never happened to me either. He’s oddly reluctant about her offer of dinner. Just get in there mate, don’t worry about the detail, just nod in the right places and go along with it. To his credit, his reluctant seems to have evaporated by the time she talks herself into his apartment and takes her clothes off.
Clare claims to have known him all her life because he has been visiting during her childhood and teenage years from the future but because he isn’t in the future yet, he doesn’t know that. Now I’m not sure how it’s handled in the book but we’ve just been given 90% of the plot in the first ten minutes...
Then we get flashbacks to when Henry visited her in the past but what we don’t get to see enough of is the progression of their relationship. What caused Clare, as a young girl, to fall so madly in love with him? She just seemed to believe that they were destined to be together and it was so inevitable that she never bothered to doubt it. It’s like chunks of the story have been cut out and it doesn’t help you to relate to the characters.
It’s the same with other characters. Henry’s father drifts into the story at one stage and there’s an obviously been some history there and there’s a story to be told but it never happens and his father disappears again.
The other 10% of the plot is revealed not long later when we find out that Henry dies at a young age. So that leaves us with no suspense left at all, leaving us with basically just a rom-com.
They get married, of course, which Henry nearly misses by dematerializing just before his bride walks down the aisle. Conveniently, when he time jumps he usually seems to pop straight back, although having aged or un-aged. Several sticky situations, like the one at the wedding, were avoided which could have added to the plot but equally might have ensured we ended up with an unpalatable slapstick comedy instead.
There's only one moment where he leaves for a long period of time, which causes an argument but the rest of the time it’s just played as a bit of an inconvenience, like he was diabetic or had a lisp or something like that. You would have thought his time travelling would have caused a lot more grief for everyone but you just don’t get that impression.
In fact very few people seem to notice his disappearances and reappearances or his random ageing and un-ageing, those that do just accept it, but then the makeup department seemed to simply rely on you counting the grey hairs on his head to gauge his age. It didn’t work. This was no Benjamin Button on that front, it was almost impossible to distinguish whether he was a younger or older.
They try for a baby and Clare easily gets pregnant, time and time again, each time the baby time-travels out of the womb and Clare risks bleeding to death but I’ve made that sound more dramatic than it was. Henry decides he’s not going to put her through another pregnancy and has a vasectomy. Undeterred, Clare slopes off to meet a younger pre-vasectomy version of Henry who has time travelled forward to the present and shags him in a parking lot. She falls pregnant again and this one goes full turn. Bingo, time travelling Daughter is born.
It’s a film that seems in a rush to tell its story and consequently doesn’t, it trips over itself on occasion and unnecessarily so because at only an hour and forty minutes, they had time to spare to flesh out the full story, which I’m sure is in there somewhere.
Apparently in the book, two of the things that keep Henry in the present are running and sex, as both these activities relieve his stresses. As a big fan of both, I was sad to see these aspects overlooked. He also has to avoid alcohol but it was never really explained why. Another good stress reliever surely?
What we have in the end is another film about a couple who face adversity due to their circumstances but in the end, of course, love wins through, except this has a bit of time travel in it. Apparently the book isn't as mushy.
So a pleasant enough film but incredibly disappointing. It wasn’t a film that needed too much dissecting in the pub afterwards.
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