Speaking of The Time Traveler's Wife: Review of the HBO Series

Speaking of The Time Traveler's Wife, I watched the HBO series and then went back and watched the movie.

The series is...odd. I thought the actors were fine, Rose Leslie being something of a powerhouse. 

The oddity is the plot. It ends rather abruptly with the wedding. Although the episodes are threaded through with interviews with the couple once they are married, the series isn't much about the "wife." It is about the dating.

The Time Traveler's Courtship might be the better title.

Though the movie with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams also spends a great deal of time on the courtship, it moves forward to the natural resolution. In comparison, the series feels, perhaps unfairly, like it was written by a bunch of people who just don't get marriage and didn't particularly want to write about it. There are token claims made about the depth and hardiness of marriage--but it is all tell, very little show.

While Jane Austen never wrote about anything beyond the wedding, she never pretended that she was attempting to do otherwise. And she obviously understood marriages quite well since she surrounded her protagonists with dozens of married couples: good, bad, silly, odd, successful, and so on. 

With The Time Traveler's Wife (HBO), however, Clare's desire to have a child plus the couple's mutual love of their daughter is almost la-la-la-hands-over-our-ears avoided. The fight between Henry and Clare regarding Henry's vasectomy is about them, not about the family Clare hopes to build. There is one hint of the daughter's existence. Otherwise, well, we can't have kids messing up the love story, can we?! 

It makes me wonder if the writers planned, initially, a second season, and then, when it fell through, packed everything into what was left. 

The movie has its flaws but overall, I would say it does a finer job. 

To end: a charge of "grooming" was apparently leveled at the series, the idea that by showing up in Clare's life initially when she was a child, Henry was prepping her to be his wife, to attach herself to him, so he could do all kinds of nefarious things with her later--like date her and marry her and buy a house with her and start a family with her. Oh, the horror!

I guess soul-mates is totally off the table these days. 

Sometimes I miss the 70s-80s and the (surprisingly) more laid-back attitude about relationships and sex. And sometimes, I think the "we are so offended" types truly do want the entire world of art and literature and comedy reduced to earnest lectures in rooms with textbooks and checklists. So much for the wild, unforeseen, odd, tacky, weird, beautiful, transcendent, off-kilter, dumb, inevitable, honest, ridiculous, and human. "Unique" will be a little check-box with several bulleted requirements. 

In any case, I think the HBO scriptwriters brought the criticism of so-called "grooming" on themselves by bringing up the issue so much. 

Strange script.