The Time Traveller's Wife.

Adaptations of popular novels. Tricky, isn't it, hmmm? It's a difficult
business, because, as the old chestnut goes, it's never the same as what you
had in your head.

The Time Traveller's Wife was always going to be a hard sell on these lines
because it's well written, and got some chin-strokey scifi elements with the
time travel, but is essentially a sentimental love story. In the book, Henry
and Claire are deeply likable people; Claire is well defined as the kind of
woman clever men fall in love with, and I'm sure the same holds true of Henry
for women. Hence, at the core of any film adaptation needs to be a performance
of this kind.

Well, sorry. Didn't happen. Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are *alright*. I
wouldn't like to give the impression that they were awful, that wouldn't be
fair. But you'd kind of hope for the kind of screen chemistry that you got from
old school screen pairings like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Or, if you
want to be slightly less old school, the way Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey pulled
it off in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. These two, well, they were a
nice enough middle class couple. But you know. Eh.

The other thing I found difficult to swallow is that they nerfed the ending.
I'm not going to spoiler the film, and I'm certainly not going to spoiler the book,
but the end of the book was very powerful indeed, whereas the film kind of
chickened out, and presented an ending which was kind of sort of similar, but
had massively less impact. Maybe they didn't want people crying their eyes out
in the cinema, but if that's become a something to avoid in cinema, rather than
something to strive for, something's fucked up somewhere.

So, in essence, it's a nice enough film about the trials and tribulations of a
couple cursed to live their relationship in a different order from each other,
but it's a shadow of the book.