The Time Traveler's Wife.

The Time Traveler's Wife--I awaited this movie with bated breath. Adapted from the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, it promised to be . . . something else. A sci-fi romance is awfully risky business in book form, even riskier on the big screen. There really is just too much that could go wrong.

Especially for Niffenegger's little darling of a premise, things could go terribly awry. A guy with time-traveling seizures, somehow capable of meeting and keeping his One True Love? Walking the streets naked, pick-pocketing, engineering winning lottery tickets, picking locks . . . -- it all works on the page, when imaginary circumstances don't have to come to three-dimensional life.

But Rachel McAdams is real. But Eric Bana is real. But, as one critic notes, the depiction of a supposedly 40-year-old man forcing himself on a teenage girl: a little too real for comfort, even if he's actually her future lover displaced in time.

At worst, the entire thing could seem ridiculous and cheesed-up--unconvincing, absurd, stitched together. This is what the critics reacted to, the sheer improbability of it all (really, a genetic basis for his condition seems too conveniently pop-science-y to be relevant). And granted, the movie doesn't try all that hard -- or even at all -- to win you over. Opening scene: enter six-year-old Henry, disappearing from his mother's car only seconds before the inevitable car crash that kills her. He reappears outside the car, shivering in the cold, as perplexed as we are, but in two or three sentences from a randomly appearing older Henry, everything is explained!

. . . Or it's not. Or it must be, because the movie takes off from there, any confusion be damned.

Uhm.

In any case, I'd already read the book, thankfully--you must, I think, in order to be genuinely moved by the film (in order to be genuinely moved by the movie? Hm). Once you suspend your disbelief (and your discombobulation), however, the true power of Niffenegger's themes overwhelms you. For Henry, time-traveling is a cruel imposition, tearing him from his wedding ceremony, from his wife, ultimately from his happiness. But it's also an inconvenience that forces the purest of human experience on its victims. It allows Henry and Clare to live life distilled, never forgetting the brilliance of new romance (how could they, when younger Henries are always traveling forward to smooth any ruffles in their relationship?). Henry's time seizures lend a certain immortality to his love: it never begins, it never ends. It just is, popping up unexpectedly years after his death, always passionate, always as though brand new.

If I envy Henry and Clare anything, it is this: they never forget. They're always so painfully aware of every second, every moment. If modern society is always accused of being distracted while the really important things slip away, then Henry and Clare exist in the opposite extreme. They only live in each other, to the point of amorality. Their tragedy is something different from the plight of every other love story, because they don't forget, because their affections never peter out or fade away or get lost. They're always reminded of the immediacy of their love, whereas the rest of us are stuck with the mere memory of idealism. Yes, they never had a true choice in the matter, but those of us with free will (or the illusion of it?) can only hope that memory is enough--and that we will all eventually make the right choices anyway.