TIME!!

Watched The Time Traveler’s Wife yesterday and have been t

hinking about it ever since. I have put off watching this movie for a while as I assumed it was a movie adaption of yet another love story with “Oprah book club”-ish sadness and torment and the pain of lost love. I was true to some extent but it was worth the tears.

The movie is a good adaptation of what I can only imagine must be a dark and intense book. Not having read the book itself, I feel like I cannot do justice to it, so I will stick to the movie version here. This is not so much of a review as a reflection on the ideas floated in the movie. Would I call it a science fiction movie? No, it is a love story though and through. A story about love intense yet flawed in a very human way. A story about loss and man’s instinctive need to live. The movie tries to delve into these deep issues but the restrictive nature of the medium itself stops it from doing justice to the theme. Exploring the need to love and live is the central theme of the story. What makes it the consummate romance story is that even though Henry travels back and forth through time, the story is not muddled by the presence of extra characters. It involves only the people and relationships that are central to his life and the story is explained and explored through them. The pivotal scene to me that captures the existential and nostalgic mood of the movie is when an adult Clare post two miscarriages, is visited by a Henry from the past, from the beginning of their relationship . This is right after she has found out that Henry has undergone a vasectomy in order to prevent any more children from being born as they may turn out to be time travelers. It is a very short but well executed scene where the intensity of her love for him, the earlier Henry, before life has taken its course, come shining through. She also acts on her primal need to continue life by having their child by making love to him in the care. It is a reflection of the sentiment everyone feels, yearning for a past when things were better, life was easier and the world was full of possibilities . Throughout the story the feeling of yearning for the past is a constant presence and given the fact that Henry can go through the past, reliving it, though totally out of his control, makes it even more unfair for Clare. The sense of loss – of love, of time, of life – is so intense that it begs the question, would you really want to travel in time, past or future if you knew there was nothing you could do to change it? Would you want to know how you die, when you die and would death then be any less painful for your loved ones? Would going back time and again to a point in the past that was pivotal and excruciatingly painful help you deal with it any better? The one thought that echoed through my mind while watching this movie and after too was to live every moment to the fullest, as if was your last. For you never know and even if you do, there is nothing you can do to change it.