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The Time Traveler’s Wife is about a girl (the lovely Rachel McAdams) who falls in love with a guy (the Eric Bana) who keeps disappearing uncontrollably and then turning up in another time. Sounds like many couples we know of, except that when he disappears he literally disappears, i.e. fades out and vanishes. Somehow they manage to have a relationship despite the obvious impediment, except that it doesn’t unfold in chronological order so there’s a lot of confusion, and if you think the lovers are bewildered try being in the audience.

I for one think it’s a charming premise because nothing kills romance faster than seeing the beloved every single day until you just want to enter a witness protection program. But that’s just me. There are filmmakers who could’ve done something with this plot; director Robert Schwentke, working from a screenplay by the man who wrote Ghost, is not one of them.

For starters he insists on trying to anchor this improbable story in workaday reality instead of letting the fantasy fly. The movie tries to explain the time traveling as a genetic anomaly called ‘chrono-impairment’, which sounds like an excuse a kid might make for not doing his homework (‘I was suddenly transported into the Jurassic and a dinosaur ate my homework’). So this bizarre thing happens all the time, and no one sees the sheer wackiness of it or the surreal humor of cheating on someone with himself from a different time period.

By the way the time traveler keeps meeting himself at different periods of his life, which means that whenever he jumps through time he creates a copy of himself. However, the appearance of Eric Banas from the past and the future doesn’t affect the present, and the future remains the same, which means that no parallel universes are created. Which means there may be an infinity of Eric Banas walking around the same universe, and we want to move there, even if some of them have terrible hair.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is muddled and maudlin, but see it anyway if you like rewriting movies in your head. True, there was another reason we saw this movie.

Q. Why does the time traveler Eric Bana lose all his clothes whenever he jumps through time?
A. Because clothes cannot travel through time, a convention established by the Terminator movies. (Why can flesh and bone travel but not fabric? I thought everything was the same at quantum level.)
B. Because it’s in the novel by Audrey Niffenegger. (We haven’t read it, so please enlighten us.)
C. Because it’s Eric Bana, and this is our Low Expectations Movie of the Week.

As my friend put it during one naked Bana scene, “I’m getting this movie in Blu-ray.”

“But you can’t see anything in the dark,” I pointed out.

“That’s why I’m getting it in Blu-ray.”

The movie reminded me of Alan Lightman’s fascinating novel Einstein’s Dreams, particularly the chapter about time displacements.

“When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.”