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The one serious misstep on the part of Rubin is the film's opening. In the book we get a really clever moment as the Clare meets a man she has fallen in love with who hasn't met her yet. Rather than playing on the confusion of this as Niffenegger does in the novel, we get a very simple, schematic approach to an explanation — moments after a childhood Henry has his inadvertent time travel episode, an adult Henry promptly explains what happened to him. There are special effects and there's interesting editing and it's all very cinematic. It's nice, but it's over-expository. As an audience, we don't really need this intro to Henry and it removes some of the mystery of his past that the book did so well in keeping mysterious.

The film doesn't take long in getting to the scene where Henry meets Clare for the first time. Here the reality of it plays out a bit more like an aging single guy's idea of fantasy romance than it does in the book. We see a 40-year-old Bana approached by a beautiful woman ten years younger than him — a woman he's never met before who is completely in love with him and is desperate to go back to his place to have sex with him, where she seems fascinated by how young he is. Without the context of the book, it feels a bit weird.

On the whole, the romance between Clare and Henry never really comes together in the film all that well. McAdams hasn't really crafted a unique enough personality for Clare to really seem like much of an individual here and the script doesn't exactly make that easy for the actress. Gone is so much of the wit and energy that made the character so compelling to begin with. Nine-year-old actress Brooklynn Proulx makes a much more charming Clare as she meets him for the first time in a forest clearing at ages six and eight. The youngster does a stunning job with the opportunity she's given. McAdams has talent, but Proulx outshines her quite a bit here, making the character of young Clare seem much more compelling than her adult counterpart.

The Verdict

While the book has a complexity of human emotion that the film's simplicity lacks, the metaphor of Henry's condition is never really presented in a way that makes full use of that realistic complexity. The overly sentimental notions of fate and romance tend to play much better on the big screen than they do on the page, so the film is actually a much more potent exploration of the fantastic romance and emotional tragedy of the story. That being said, the film fails to deliver some fairly basic elements of the story to the screen in a way that supports the story well enough to be understood vividly by an audience. This story is one that my work the best with a quick skimming of the novel before going to see a far more elegant movie adaptation. It's a bit of an awkward way to experience the story, but so is the romance between Clare and Henry. And perhaps, like their romance, it's worth the awkwardness.

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