The Time Traveler's Wife

Eric Bana stars in this no-heartstring-left-unmolested adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling book Discuss this article

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Eric Bana stars in this no-heartstring-left-unmolested adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling book about a gentleman cursed with the ability to slip randomly through the decades. This nasty habit of disappearing willy-nilly between past, present and future doesn’t stop him from hooking up with his soulmate (Rachel McAdams), whom he first meets as a six-year-old girl and eventually marries. In between her delivery of exposition-chunky dialogue and his various post-travelling reappearances in the buff (Bana fans: there will be buns), audiences are given ample opportunities to swoon over a romance that defies eras, age ranges and every semblance of narrative logic.

That the actors can pull off such Oprah-friendly, sci-fi-inflected sap and keep straight faces is the most fantastic thing about this loopy love story. Granted, they’re in familiar territory – Bana has already played sexy, sensitive and saddled with inconvenient superpowers in Hulk, while McAdams perfected her achy-breaky bona fides in The Notebook – and neither seems genetically capable of giving a dull performance. But they’re only human, and mere mortals can’t salvage a Möbius striptease that’s overly dependent on keeping you slack-jawed by its cleverness. Your tolerance for Hallmark-card sentimentality, meanwhile, will have been tapped dry long before the clock runs out.

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