Thinking about The Time Traveler's Wife

 

 

 

 

I hear that HBO’s Time Traveler’s Wife series was a dud and has been cancelled. Ironically, I recently plucked Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel from a neighborhood “little library,” read it, and then watched the 2009 movie adaptation. I don’t get HBO, but it doesn’t surprise me that it bombed or that the 2009 movie, though watchable, was on the lame side of the ledger. Put simply, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a tough book to adapt for platforms that require tamer, more saccharine material.

 

Remember Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five? It contains a killer line: “Billy Pilgrim had become unstuck in time.” That’s the premise of The Time Traveler’s Wife. It protagonist is Henry DeTamble, who works at Chicago’s Newberry Library. He suffers from Chrono-Impairment, a genetic flaw that causes him to time travel against his will. It’s not only inconvenient; it’s dangerous. When Henry time travels, his clothing does not–not even his underwear. Imagine being 36, thrust into a summertime meadow, and encounter a six-year-old girl, Clare Abshire, who will become your future wife. (He’s only eight years older when they wed decades later.) Even worse, imagine being jerked from the present to a snowy bad Chicago neighborhood naked as a jay bird. Henry never knows when it will happen, who he will encounter, what age he will be at his new destination, or when he will return to the Newberry or his apartment, also naked. To survive, Henry becomes an adroit thief, pickpocket, and street brawler.

 

At 546 pages, Niffenegger’s novel was hefty, though highly entertaining and populated with meaningful characters, among them: friends Gomez and Charisse; Dr. Kendrick, a geneticist who tries to help Henry; Henry’s father, Richard, once a concert violinist; and Henry’s mother, Annette, an operatic singer who died in a car crash when Henry was a child. Henry can’t change the past, but he has visited his mother and seen her die time and time again. At heart, though, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a romance, the eventual coming together of Henry and Clare. Henry time travels, but does this relationship have a future?

 

Time travel books are hard to film. Do you make a romance, a science fiction offering, or try to emphasize both aspects? Most opt for the last of these, but it can be problematic to strike the correct balance. This is especially true for The Time Traveler’s Wife; its time travel elements notwithstanding, Niffenegger seeks levels of verisimilitude. The best time travel movies are fantasies, like the movie version of Jack Finney’s Time After Time in which Jack the Ripper appropriates H. G. Wells’ time machine and Wells pursues him in 1970s San Francisco, in his tweeds of course!

 

The Time Traveler’s Wife is cut from different cloth. Henry is whip smart, but he’s also a rogue. The is a lot of sex in the novel and, before marrying Clare, Henry was a horndog. To survive, he is also violent; Gomez, who knows about Henry’s Chromo-impairment, sees a younger Henry out of time brutally beating a man he is robbing. The novel is fueled by the punk scene, intellectual conversations, and dark real-life problems such as Clare’s five miscarriages. There are also some very sweet moments.

 

Guess which elements show up on the screen?  (There’s also a musical of The Time Traveler’s Wife, but I will steer well clear of that!) The 2009 movie cast Rachel McAdams as Clare. She was perfectly fine, but all her edges and sex drive are smoothed out. Similarly, Eric Bana was Henry with his inner bad boy sliced away. This makes Henry’s time travel and disappearances more of a studio trick than the very essence of the story.

 

In short, The Time Traveler’s Wife in book form places Henry in a lot of peril in between its uplifting moments; the movie reverses the equation. The novel is also told from differing perspectives and that too is difficult to do on film. After all, a 107-minute movie doesn’t have the time to show multiple perspectives or different voices. The movie isn’t bad, but it’s like an expurgated Reader’s Digest version of the narrative.

 

I get the allure of adapting novels for stage and film. How many novelists get a chance to make big money? If, though, you want to do a deep dive into characters and circumstances, read The Time Traveler’s Wife. There’s always time for fluff later.

 

Rob Weir