What is it with men in women’s romantic fantasy films? When they’re not aging backward like Benjamin Button, they’re falling in love from two years away (“The Lake House’’) or from the Great Beyond (“Ghost’’) or from another planet (“Starman’’). They’re perfect but just not for keeping. The good ones, these movies imply, always get away.
In “The Time Traveler’s Wife,’’ the good one keeps getting away and coming back, getting away and coming back, like a dreamboat yo-yo. His name is Henry and he’s played by Eric Bana, which is all many women will need to know, and he has a peculiar condition that at one point, with the sort of earnestness that can provoke gales of laughter if you’re feeling rude, is called “chrono-impermanence.’’ Henry helplessly shuttles from point to point in his own life, dissolving here, re-appearing without his clothes there. It’s hell on a relationship. Imagine Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five’’ hero Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time and landing in a tearjerker.
Based on a best-selling novel by Audrey Niffenegger, “Time Traveler’s Wife’’ is told with a tenderness that’s unusual in a major motion picture but that leads mostly to dullness. At some point - the mechanics of time travel are left vague - Henry has met and fallen in love with Clare (Rachel McAdams) and he regularly visits her in her childhood, readying her for the oddities of their future life together. Young girls who see this movie should probably be cautioned: If a naked man speaks to you from a bush and tells you he’s your one true love, do not go with him. Even if he looks like Eric Bana.
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Because Clare does, she’s prepared for when the two meet as adults. Time-travel here is treated as an annoying but manageable physical condition, like Celiac disease or Tourette’s syndrome, and a surprising amount of humor is mined from Henry’s little problem. So what if he drops out of his tuxedo five minutes before his own wedding? A knack for predicting lottery numbers makes up for it.
While the movie is told less from Clare’s point of view than in the novel, this is still very much the story of a woman living with a frustratingly wayward man. (Ah, but it’s not his fault.) The scenes where the wife takes back some of her own life - at one point somehow cheating on her husband with her husband - are the film’s sharpest moments. At its best, “The Time Traveler’s Wife’’ does suggest the preciousness of a life that’s too often beyond our control. At its worst, it’s more than a little nuts.
The film’s disarming gentleness eventually works its way toward a soft-focus crisis that had every woman in the screening I attended happily snorfling into her Kleenex, so on that score the film’s a success. McAdams, already a stalwart of this genre after “The Notebook,’’ spends the movie glowing with the certainty of a woman’s love for a difficult spouse. Bana just keeps a straight face, which by itself qualifies him for an Oscar.
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