Daily Archives: Friday, July 1, 2016

  • The Time Traveler’s Wife

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Schwentke (2009)

    Some of the names on the credits help to establish it in the Hollywood tradition of vaguely supernatural love stories.  Brad Pitt, with Benjamin Button not yet out of his system, executive produced[1].   Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Ghost, adapted Audrey Niffenegger’s hit novel of 2003.  I suppose that people who loved the book may be able to get an emotional replay from the film.  It’s harder to see how anyone not already familiar with the material could engage much with this wet and miserable tale.  Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana), a Chicago librarian, has a rare genetic order which causes him to time travel.  It’s one of those screen disorders that’s supposed to be ‘unpredictable’ but which soon becomes just the opposite, although one of the film’s few slightly amusing moments is provided by a geneticist (Stephen Tobolowsky) when he diagnoses Henry’s  condition as ‘chrono-displacement’.  In any case, the condition leads to considerable complications in Henry’s marriage to the eponymous Clare (Rachel McAdams).

    The Time Traveler’s Wife begins with Henry as a young boy, sitting in the back of his mother’s car.  It’s just before Christmas; the mother is a classical singer and Henry joins in with the carol ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ (the tune used for the English carol lyric ‘A great and mighty wonder’).  The car crashes and bursts into flames, the mother is killed, and Henry finds himself observing the scene – then watching himself and his parents in a flashback to their happy home life.  A man appears at the scene of the crash and comforts the terrified and naked boy:  the man explains that there’s no need to worry – that he (the boy) is a time traveller and that he (the man) is the boy’s adult self.  As reassurances go, I’ve heard better:  it certainly doesn’t eclipse the upsetting bit when the distraught and baffled child reviews a past domestic bliss from which he’s now cut off (he calls out to his mother but she doesn’t see or hear him).   But the whole sequence is confusing, especially in retrospect.  It gives the impression that the chrono-displacement has been triggered by the road accident – and I never did get clear, throughout the picture, why Henry’s travels usually placed him in a scene interacting directly with Clare, either as a young girl or a grown woman, but occasionally had him on the outside looking in on himself and others.  The script is similarly selective about Henry’s ability to pick up information from the future that he can make good use of when he goes backwards in time.  I didn’t understand either how widely known his peculiarities were – or how Clare explained his repeated absences to her family and friends.

    As that opening sequence with the undressed child suggests, Henry, whenever he goes on his travels, leaves his clothes in his place of departure and fetches up naked in his new environment.  He can usually lay his hands on an outfit instantaneously but his   predicament is used a couple of times for mildly comic effect.  The effect is lame but this didn’t stop me thinking that the material was more suitable for a comedy.  (The film could certainly use something like the Whoopi Goldberg medium in Ghost to liven it up.)  Yet The Time Traveler’s Wife takes itself pretty seriously.   It presents familiar indicators of a vanished paradisal happiness – Christmas trees, verdant meadows – in a visually idealised way (Florian Ballhaus did the cinematography) and uses its sci-fi basis as a peg on which to hang a maudlin romance.  (According to Wikipedia, Audrey Niffenegger, ‘frustrated in love when she began the work, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships’.)

    Henry’s ability to move in more than one temporal direction doesn’t help him avoid the normal human consequences of time.  He dies and, although he can move to a point in the future beyond which his death occurred, he does so as a man never older than his early forties – the age at which his life ended.   His mortality is oddly emphasised:  when Clare says to Henry, ‘You’re going to die, aren’t you?’, she makes it sound as if this is his genetic abnormality – as if she and other people won’t have the same problem.   As in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the medical implications of the hero’s complaint are treated in a straight-faced (and inadvertently funny) way.  Clare’s several failed pregnancies are ascribed to Henry’s transmitting his condition to the foetus (resulting in a kind of pre-natal self-displacement, I suppose).   To spare his wife the continuing trauma of miscarriage, he decides to have a vasectomy but Clare is then impregnated during a visit by a pre-vasectomised Henry and this pregnancy goes to term.  The child Alba is diagnosed with chrono-displacement syndrome but we’re told that, unlike her father, she can control her travels.  This sounds suspiciously like having it both ways (and if there was any suggestion that Alba disappeared in a way that caused her mother distress, I missed it).

    Eric Bana is no one’s idea of a librarian and sometimes looks himself to be the product of a weird kind of genetic mutation – a cross between Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson with a bit of Richard Gere mixed in.  Yet he has a good-humoured alertness and the ability to suggest speed of thought that none of those other three has.  Bana’s strapping appearance is liable to get him typecast.  This would be a pity because the contrast between his musculature and his quality of gentleness is distinctive.  That’s not the word you’d use to describe Rachel McAdams, although she’s perfectly competent as Clare.  All the children in the film – Alex Ferris as young Henry, Brooklynn Proulx as young Clare, Tatum McCann and Hailey McCann as Alba (aged five and ten respectively) – are over-competent:  they’ve been directed to give performances that are too finished – and inexpressive.   With Ron Livingston and Jane McLean as the couple who are Henry’s and Clare’s best friends, Arliss Howard and Michelle Nolden as Henry’s parents, Fiona Reid (the groom’s mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and Philip Craig as Clare’s.   The eclectic choice of music, supplementing an uninspired score by Mychael Danna, includes a cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Broken Social Scene (who supplied the music for Half Nelson).

    23 August 2009

    [1] According to Wikipedia, The Time Traveler’s Wife was originally scheduled for release in the autumn of 2008.  Although the article doesn’t suggest this as a reason for the eventual delay of nearly a year, it’s worth noting that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button arrived in cinemas late last year.

  • The Thin Red Line

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terrence Malick (1998)

    James Jones’ novel about the American soldiers fighting the Guadalcanal campaign (of whom Jones was one) was published in 1962, more than a decade after From Here to Eternity.   At five hundred pages, it’s not quite two-thirds the length of the earlier book but Terrence Malick’s film, at a hundred and seventy minutes, is almost half as long again as Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, written by Daniel Taradash.  (A 1964 movie of The Thin Red Line, directed by Andrew Marton, ran ninety-nine minutes.)   What’s more, Malick’s film is so misshapen that you feel a large amount of footage must have been cut from the version released in cinemas.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘In addition to the cast seen in the final cut of the film, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke also performed, but their scenes were eventually cut. Editor Leslie Jones was on location for five months and rarely saw Malick, who left her to her own devices.  After principal photography wrapped, she came back with a five-hour first cut and spent seven months editing … It was at this point that editor Billy Weber came on board and they spent 13 months in post-production and the last four months mixing the film …’

    The central consciousness in the story is Private Witt and the film begins with him living on a South Pacific island, where he’s gone AWOL with another soldier.  Life on the island is harmonious although there’s a natural early apprehension on the part of the natives because Witt is an American soldier.  Yet he’s a pacific, nearly a pacifist character – the islanders trust him more than does his company sergeant Welsh, Witt’s polar opposite.  Witt is picked up from the island by the company and imprisoned on a troop carrier before being given the job of stretcher-bearer.  Back on Guadalcanal, the landscapes are so beautifully lit (by John Toll) that they seem less real than aestheticised. Throughout the film, the elegiac music by Hans Zimmer comes over as an uninspired rip-off of the Barber ‘Adagio’ used in Platoon.   However, once the military action is underway, The Thin Red Line becomes, for a while, impressive.   The soldiers’ fearful unknowing of what lies ahead of them round the next corner or the over the next hill is gripping.  The main warfare sequences are marvellously edited – and well judged in that the carnage, although shocking, is never gratuitous.

    The main problem is that Terrence Malick either can’t or doesn’t want to fuse the metaphysical musing – to which the people in his films are prone – with character.  As in The Tree of Life, there’s a lot of voiceover, spreading from one soldier to another like a virus.  I was rarely sure whether the person we were seeing on screen at the time was also the one talking – because, whereas the actors can make the people they’re playing distinctive as we watch them, they’re nearly all reduced to a single voice.  The original editor Leslie Jones is quoted on Wikipedia as saying that ‘Malick removed scenes with dialogue whenever possible’:  if only he’d done the same with monologue.  Lt Colonel Tall, a bullet-headed, barking senior officer overplayed by Nick Nolte, is given too much self-exposition – not only in voiceover but also in scenes involving other people.  And when Witt’s voice on the soundtrack asks when did it all go wrong for the human race, you want to ask him what he’s talking about.  He seems to think there really was a golden age when the peoples of the world lived happily together – and spoke English, as the Melanesian woman with whom Witt has a conversation in the Edenic prologue, obligingly does.

    In spite of its philosophical pretensions, I wasn’t convinced that The Thin Red Line offered new insights into the madness of war – it certainly doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that American involvement in the Second World War wasn’t madness.  The film also features some stock characters – like the embittered Tall and Private John Bell, who dreams of being back with the wife who eventually deserts him.  The script is tiresomely schematic so that each man represents one thing:  Witt keeps flashing back to the island paradise, Bell keeps thinking about his wife (is he the only married man in the company?) etc.

    In spite of their mostly sketchy characters, the actors get a lot going.  They’re convincing as a company of fighting men who had civilian lives.  This is especially true of Sean Penn as Sergeant Welsh, who has to work harder than we first realise to appear inured and cynical.  Jim Caviezel, although he may be a limited actor, is well cast as the idealistic Witt.  His almost weirdly calm handsomeness allows him to blend into the island paradise easily – and it’s good the way that Witt works on Welsh’s nerves:  the man of the world just doesn’t get the one who can stand outside it.  Ben Chaplin does creditably as Bell and Elias Koteas is excellent as the courageously principled Captain Staros.  The remarkable cast also includes, among many others, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, John C Reilly and John Travolta.  And Adrien Brody:  his role was notoriously shorn – a fact Brody discovered when he saw the film in the cinema.  (He’s reduced to little more than looking frightened a handful of times.)   Yet the terrific line-up is almost self-defeating.   Late on in the film, when Welsh, looking pissed off as only Sean Penn can, says (in an interior monologue), ‘Here they come, one after another … ‘, you can’t help laughing – because we’ve seen so many well-known faces in the company.  The latest recruit who prompts Welsh’s remark is George Clooney (in an effective cameo as the replacement for Staros when he’s sent back to the US).

    The film appears to be on the point of ending for most of its final hour and on the point of exhaustion for much of that.  I couldn’t believe it when Malick launched another military assault late in the day – although the only purpose of this seems to be to get Witt killed and ceremonially buried by Welsh (Penn’s acting comes close to saving the scene).  Having seen The Tree of Life the week before, I’m not sure The Thin Red Line ever ended:  ‘To be continued – more than a decade later’ would really have been the thing to put on the screen above the closing credits.  Bell’s wife’s Dear John letter must be one of the most annoying ever written:  she not only tells him she’s found a new man; she also, like so many others, burbles on about the meaning of life.  Reading the letter, Bell hears her voice intoning, ‘I have no right to talk to you like this but I can’t help myself:  it’s become such a habit’.   This sounds like Terrence Malick coming clean.

    24 July 2011

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