This is HG Wells on love: "I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding and reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow... I think it is almost as essential in our lives as our self consciousness.
...When we make love, we are trying to make another human being concentrate for us as an impersonation or at least a symbol of the Lover-Shadow in our minds; and when we are in love it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream -- attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated."
How you react to that passage will perhaps say something about your age, your gender, your self-image; most pertinently, it'll reveal where you land on the scale of Pragmatist to Romantic, and how you feel about your rating. Some folks are proud romantics, more are slightly sheepish and coy about it, and in most mixed-gender crowds it's hipper to scoff (at all things, but especially at love). That is not to say I think the romantics are right or the pragmatists are mere killjoys. (Any true romantic will tell you there's more anguish in it than joy. They will also tell you there's a razor-thin line between pleasure and pain, and that they've spent at least one summer listening to nothing but Joy Divison. Aptly enough, Joy Division is a theme shared by these two films: spot the references!) I do think that our modern-day notions of romance are forced, untrue, even cruel, and this is a perfect double-feature to use in the examination of the issue.
To begin with, the Time Traveler's Wife. It's got a splendid cast and a big-money look, and what better new slant to lay over the top of the old boy-meets-girl chestnut than a fellow who's shaken loose in time, who might turn up grey-haired for your wedding or post-pubescent when you're forty? There may be a metaphor in it for those damaged but well-meaning lovers among us who show up when they can but often forget to bring their inner selves with them. If so, that's more interesting than what most viewers will bring away, which is a fairly straightforward primer for the female of the species on everything we're supposed to obsess over from the youngest age to the oldest: romantic love and its relationship with destiny (because without destiny at its foundation, romantic love stands on very shaky little colt-hooves indeed), the Very Expensive Wedding and the conventional and mutually-fixated marriage lived in the always immaculate home and accompanied by the traditional, compulsive emotionality over breeding and child-rearing. The Wife works as some unspecified sort of artist, but that doesn't have much to do with her Life (that is to say, with The Husband); it's merely what she does. She keeps no servants, but somehow the house is always dauntingly immaculate, interestingly so, like those ideal living rooms you see in the most expensive but ecologically-correct catalogues for those rich people who were raised by hippies and don't want their houses to look like rich people's houses. How does she do it? or does he? We never see anyone wasting time cleaning, although a main bonding experience seems to be the mutual preparation of food in their very immaculate and interesting-looking kitchen. It's all shorthand, I expect, for Traditional Family Values and subliminal advertising for those expensive catalogues. Otherwise we'd see someone doing the occasional dish or getting annoyed that the garbage hadn't made it to the curb on time.
On the one hand, I dare you to look me in the eyes and say you do not love Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in this movie, do not look forward with curiosity roused to the next leap in time (where will he find clothes? who will be waiting for him after his leap? and how does death, as it must, fit in?). On the other hand, the movie feels dangerous in the way that Sleepless in Seattle did all those years ago: impressionable girls are going to come away with a handful of irresistibly attractive notions that are not Romantic in the most soulful sense, but "romantic" in a cynical, wedding-industry way. And although its story is unequivocally engaging, its script is an obstacle on the road to any quality the film achieves: in its best moments it is pedestrian and obvious, buoyed up only by the talents involved and the strangeness built into the story itself. (My favorite moment is after Claire and Henry have had a life-changing fight. She gets a secret call in the night and sneaks out to pick up a younger version of Henry who has just time-traveled into the moment. He asks where his older self is, she tells him, "I wanted a little time away from him," and he says, "How's that working out for you?" in that low-key, Eric Bana way.) At the lowest point in their marriage, Claire rails that because she met him when she was eight and they had already been married several years from his perspective, she'd never been given a real choice, a fighting chance.
(500) Days has its focus pulled in on the destiny question as well but the debate is laid straight out on the table: Summer (Zooey Deschanel) doesn't believe in love, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a big old gooey and glum romantic who thinks he's found his soulmate. If Time Traveler dipped a little too liberally into that old paintpot marked "SENTIMENT. WARNING: TOXIC IF OVERUSED" and felt its wings dragged down near-fatally into muck, (500) Days flirts, but ultimately non-fatally, with over-cleverness. Part of what saves it is the quality of its pop culture satire, like the soda-pop-advertisement-ish music video that is our young hero's morning walk to work after his first night spent in Summer's arms, or the Bergman film he gets caught in once the relationship goes south. Again the cast is near-perfect and Levitt's charms and sex appeal win us over in a character that might have seemed irredeemable.
Those cynics among you who are NOT secret romantics will be annoyed to learn that the True Love vs Sheer Fantasy debate tips ultimately into the corner of the romantics, but only after a rather good and very funny examination of both sides. Tom works as a writer of greeting cards and ultimately recognizes that the business he is in is part of the problem, along with pop music and Hollywood (we are told early on that his ideas about love were gleaned from repeated early viewings of the Graduate on television. When he takes Summer to see it she leaves the cinema weeping uncontrollably). There's more than a little Annie Hall here, with its meta-fictional tactics, its quirky-girl heroine (poor Zooey. She didn't ask to be the archetype of eccentric muse girl, did she?), its fast-and-loose playing with time. On first viewing, it bears up surprisingly well beneath that weighty mantle.
Here's the final tally: all told, I cried only once, and then only a few tears (four or five, tops) during the Time Traveler's Wife despite repeated coaxings for a more prodigious outflow, and I frown upon its lack of introspection, but I laughed many times, sometimes loudly and long, during (500) Days, and I like its negative capability: it knows destiny isn't true, but it believes in it anyway. So that one wins.
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