Last night, I saw the movie version of The Time Traveler’s Wife (reviewed on this blog here). I was a bit apprehensive about the movie, both because I feared that the movie wouldn’t do the book justice, and because I was dreading watching some of the more difficult scenes from the book. But I knew I had to steel myself and see it. Here is my take on book vs. movie, Time Traveler-style.
Warning: there are spoilers ahead, both of the book and the movie. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie yet, proceed with caution!
The movie The Time Traveler’s Wife has gotten mixed to negative reviews, but I have to say that I enjoyed it. I wonder what I would have thought had I not read the book (and would love to hear from anyone who has seen it but not read it), but I thought the movie was as faithful to the book as it could have been in two hours. There is a lot that the movie left out, but it covered the main plot points of the book – Henry’s mother’s death, his relationship with Clare, their friendship with Gomez, and the birth of their daughter.
The first part of the movie felt a little rushed – the early days when Clare is young and Henry is older, and their “courtship” during her teen years, are treated very quickly – and I felt that it left out some of the interesting elements of their early relationship, such as when they sleep together for the first time when she’s 18, and some of the getting-to-know-each-other scenes in Clare’s early 20s.
But the movie does a nice job of demonstrating the inevitability of their relationship, Clare’s frustration about not having been able to choose the direction of her life, and the depth of their love. I also liked that the movie was sort of dark and shadow-y in the way that the book was. Clare and Henry don’t live in bright, whitewashed settings in a sun-kissed golden Hollywood world – their lives were at times gritty and cold and sad and sort of messy. And the movie captured that well.
Casting-wise, Rachel McAdams was perfect. Just perfect. (How can she look so beautiful no matter what she is doing or wearing?). I didn’t love Eric Bana. I imagined Henry as a little more slight – Bana is tall and toned. He also seemed kind of mechanical. I know that Henry was a closed-off, walled person when Clare met him, but Bana’s portrayal of him never really let those walls come down (except when Alba was around, when he adopted that classic beatific parental gaze that Hollywood likes to use to convey that a character really, really loves his or her child).
Some things that the movie left out: Henry’s troubles at work due to his disappearing, the Ingrid storyline, the sexual episodes with Gomez and Clare, most of Clare’s relationship with her family, and Henry’s losing his feet (he does end up in a wheelchair but it’s not as bad as in the book). Henry’s impregnating Clare takes place in a car, instead of in bed with an older Henry sleeping next to them (which I found disappointing, because that was a memorable part of the book), and the final scene, when Clare is 80. My friend with whom I saw the movie thought that the movie ended on a more ambiguous, hopeful note, perhaps to satisfy a mass audience.
A few other quibbles… Bana doesn’t look different enough from scene to scene to cue the viewer about how old he is. Other than some grey hair at his wedding, he doesn’t really look that much older as the ceremony groom than he does as the first dance groom. And at the end of the movie, we’re supposed to think that he is wasting away, getting sicker and thinner, but he really doesn’t. The movie doesn’t convey the inevitability of Henry’s decline the way the book did.
Ok, so what did I like? For me, I just loved seeing this book play out on screen. Going through the same calculations and mystery-solving in the theater as I did while reading the book. And most of all, just giving in to the (admittedly sappy at times) love story between these two people who were bound to each other at the most basic and fundamental level.
I recommend seeing the movie, especially if you have read the book. I view it as sort of a companion piece for the book – it certainly doesn’t come close to replicating the experience of reading it, and the alternating first person narration, which was so effective in the book, is lost on the screen. But the movie doesn’t offend the book in any way, and I am very glad that I saw it.