In the boring, benign and inconsequential transfer from best-seller to film of The Time Traveler’s Wife, an adventurous Chicago librarian is cursed with a genetic mutation disorder that forces him to shift involuntarily back and forth in time, regardless of age. There’s no warning when this anomaly will strike, but every time it does, he just dissolves, leaving behind a puddle of clothes as he melts, like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, and returns stark naked, on busy streets or in crowded public rooms, providing the audience with a number of unobstructed views of Australian actor Eric Bana’s rear end. Those who keep tabs on such things might consider that much skin adequate compensation for suffering through just under two hours of stultifying tedium. Unfortunately, this movie needs a great deal more to keep more demanding viewers from snoring.
Henry, the time-traveler, first became aware of his skills and their resulting predicaments when as a small boy he survived a violent automobile accident that killed his mother and left him traumatized for life. Through the years, she keeps appearing, not even knowing the man she’s talking to is her son, but there is nothing he can do to reverse fate, warn her to stay off snowy highways, or change the course of history. The time-traveler’s wife, played by scrumptious Canadian actress Rachel McAdams, is a beautiful art student named Clare, who has been in love with Henry since she met him at the age of six in a meadow behind her house. He was a 36-year-old naked man hiding in the bushes who asked her for her picnic blanket to cover up his private parts. (“I’m a time traveler—I come from the future, and when I do, I don’t get to bring my clothes.”) In this preposterous fable, instead of running screaming to the police, she believes his story, pledges undying love, and waits decades for the day when they can finally meet in real time. When they do, he doesn’t recognize her from a different time zone but she weathers every challenge until he marries her. Sometimes she’s six, back in the meadow where she learns to keep extra trousers on hand just in case, and sometimes she’s a grown woman, but one thing that never changes is her love. There are a few perks to time travel (you see the world and you never have to pack or wear a tie) but it doesn’t take long for Clare to experience the downside. When he shows up on their wedding day, he’s got gray hair. When he vanishes on their wedding night, he’s got black hair. Young, old, or in Never Never Land, one thing is constant—he never, ever shaves.
Let’s face it. Time travel is the pits. I mean, you just can’t depend on a mate who is never around when needed. Henry can’t drive a car because he might disappear behind the wheel in the middle of traffic. He can’t fly in a plane because it will never be in the same place in the sky it was when he returns. He’s never around for the big events, like meeting Clare’s parents, childbirth, or holidays. “Did I miss Christmas?” “And New Year’s.” But when he comes back from the future with a winning lottery ticket for five million dollars, all is suddenly forgiven. Arriving at various destinations with no wallet and his Johnson hanging out, it’s inevitable that he turns to thieves, thugs and killers for travelers’s aid. The movie grows longer and loopier by the minute until Henry comes home again one day with a bullet hole in his head. That’s when Clare sees her own future—as a single parent to daughter Alba. Eventually Henry travels beyond his own life span and meets Alba, who may be seeing things herself and…oh, forget it. The movie long ago stopped making a lick of sense. From here, you’re on your own.
German director Robert Schwentke, who guided Jodie Foster through Flightplan, about the search for a child who disappears on a plane 30,000 feet in the sky, may have a feel for action in tight places, but the claustrophobia in The Time Traveler’s Wife leads to a completely different kind of panic. I couldn’t wait to escape, and it wasn’t for a breath of fresh air. Maybe the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, which a number of people seem to have read and enjoyed, was more convincing, but the unsatisfactory, yo-yo script by Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Ghost, makes no real effort to explore the inner emotions of the characters. Nobody loves, loses and learns. They’re just desperate and confused at all times. Among the supporters, Arliss Howard is wasted as Mr. Bana’s drunken, suicidal father, and all-American Ron Livingston is miscast as his lifelong friend and best man, an ethnic pal named Gomez. The film has none of the twists, ironies and paradoxes (not to mention humor) that gave the Back to the Future time-travel trilogy such a wallop. Instead, it concerns us more with trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, when and why. Half the time, I didn’t know whether the action was taking place in the future, the past, or outer space. Clearly, Eric Bana’s Henry is not the brightest bulb in the lamp. Consequently, Rachel McAdams goes through so much unnecessary and ill-advised cardboard confusion that you begin to wonder if she’s lost her marbles, too. Bring back Michael J. Fox.
A stampede of end-of-summer movies are arriving in time for Labor Day. High on the list, there is My One and Only, a colorfully written, expertly directed and beautifully acted romp about the early life of actor George Hamilton that is guaranteed to make you feel warm all over. Just when I was beginning to give up on Renee Zellweger, she returns to glory in the role of a flighty, eccentric, often-married and sadly fading Scarlett O’Hara with two teenage sons to raise who sets off on a road trip across America in search of a rich new husband. Get ready for some joy.
Set in the flamboyant Fifties, it begins in New York when Ann Deveraux returns to her swanky apartment from a hard day of shopping and finds her two-timing Texas-born society bandleader husband (Kevin Bacon) in bed with another woman. Fiddle-dee-dee. The pouty, impetuous Ann packs up her two boys George (Logan Lerman) and his older stepbrother Robbie (Mark Rendall), hits the road to Boston in their flashy new Cadillac Eldorado convertible, and sets out to find a benefactor who will keep them all in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. From Boston to Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and finally Los Angeles, the flaky Ann gets cheated, robbed and heartbroken by a series of poor choices for husband material, trying vainly to be a mother, a magnetic lover, and cling to her lost youth in the process. Oblivious to age and her dwindling talent for attracting wealthy men, Mom’s conquests lead from one disaster to the next while the boys look on with sympathy and terror. Into their lives comes the heir to an art fortune (David Koechner) who steals money from her purse in the middle of an expensive dinner date and sticks her with the check; then Mom’s third husband, an iron-fisted Army colonel and military wacko (Chris Noth) who dedicates himself to fighting the Communist menace; an old socialite boyfriend (Eric McCormack) who leads her on and then deserts her for a younger woman. In St.Louis, she compromises her ideals, gets a job in a paint store, and when business improves overnight, the owner proposes. At last, the perfect man. There’s only one problem. He’s already married and on his way to jail for bigamy. Whenever things go sour, she packs up the boys and they move to another town. All Mom wants is security. All George wants is a normal life. All Robbie wants is a movie career. No wonder the boys end up acting as surrogate parents to their ditzy mother (even bailing her out after she innocently accepts a drink from an admiring undercover detective in a hotel bar and gets falsely arrested for prostitution) and they raise each other. It’s quite a task. George is a handsome, intelligent kid with a voracious appetite for books who keeps diaries of his unorthodox experiences. Robbie is a flaming queen in training who knits and wears his mother’s pearls. Once they land in Hollywood, Mom finds work as an extra in a movie western and charms the director into auditioning Robbie for the role of a cowboy. Hand on hip, mincing to the rancher’s daughter, he is both hilarious and pathetic enough for his kid brother to offer a few pointers. George is so good that he gets the part, Robbie is happily relegated to wigs, makeup and costumes, and the unexpected new family star gets photographed on the set of his first picture with a name on the back of his chair that reads “George Hamilton”.
I admit I was surprised by this revelation, but it’s no spoiler. My One and Only is based on two books of Mr. Hamilton’s memoirs and he’s also the executive producer. The facts are highly embellished (no Tennessee childhood, no affair with his father’s next wife, no romance with Lynda Byrd Johnson or marriage to Alana Stewart, and no perpetual suntan). But George’s father was society bandleader “Spike” Hamilton, his mother was glamorous Ann Stephens, and his half-brother Robbie, whose real name was Bill, became an interior decorator. George did begin his film career in 1952, when he was 13, in a Clark Gable western called Lone Star, and went on to fame playing Hank Williams, Evel Knievel, and Dracula. From barely managing to survive every crisis to supporting Ann and Bill in luxury for the rest of their lives, George Hamilton’s unconventional story was lived to be filmed, and there are still enough subplots left over for a sequel. The careful script by Charlie Peters turns a dysfunctional family into friends you wouldn’t mind knowing.
For any part of My One and Only to work, great acting is not only an asset but a requirement. Director Richard Loncraine gets immaculate performances from all of the men and especially the two boys. Mark Rendall knows just when to reign in the campy aspects of Robbie’s effeminacy and keep him overwhelmingly likeable, and in the pivotal role of George, young Logan Lerman is a true revelation with blazing promise. Tough but vulnerable, Renee Zellweger is a lonely, misunderstood Southern belle who is infuriating, adorable and touching at the same time—one of those little extra people in life who never fits in, a piece left out of the puzzle in the rain. Quirky and mercurial, she invests society’s definition of a lousy mother a big, radiant heart. It’s her best role in years, and she wears it like a form-fitting pelisse.