Spoilers ahoy!

I have the feeling that I have been very subtly, and quite effectively, manipulated.

As soon as the credits started rolling I quickly realized two things:

1) They actually went through with it and ended it on an unhappy note.  McAdams looks suicidal.

and

2) I didn’t give a shit, emotionally.

Don’t get me wrong, I get emotional at anything, so it certainly wasn’t the subject matter.  Actually truth be told I just felt plain bad for McAdams’ character and that’s when I started thinking about the Time Traveler as presented in this movie.  It took me a few blocks walking home when it hit me — McAdams married the wrong Time Traveler.

There’s a moment in the movie when she says something like “You were supposed to be my dream man,” and as the young Time Traveler grows into the older, more perfect Time Traveler, Bana gets closer and closer to perfection.  But during that transition we are treated not to the ever closer and closer feeling of perfection and marital bliss, but rather we are completely surrounded by the problems of the marriage — the absences, the miscarriages, the “infidelity”, and we’re even shown a full blown fight before running into the 20 minutes of pregnancy scares.  All in all, this isn’t happily ever after, at all, in fact it’s nothing like she imagined it to be.

So when things finally do work out, and Bana becomes the perfect Time Traveler and begins to face his certain doom we are faced with losing not what we’ve heard, but what we’ve seen, and what we’ve seen was good … but not great.  Rom-coms function by sucking us into a great relationship (no matter how unlikely its beginnings) and then ripping it away from us before resolving itself into the happy ending, but this romantic drama (unhappy ending!) didn’t rip away bliss, it told us about it.  When he dies we are left with the pleasant memories but I personally hoped McAdams would get over it rather than cling to it, because really, it wasn’t all that great of a relationship.

Personally I thought the saddest moment was her racing through the woods in pure McAdams desperation-mode in order to catch him before he left.  For a moment my breath caught as I thought she wouldn’t make it in time, but when she does, I was relieved.  It was a beautiful, fleeting moment — sort of like their entire relationship.

So why was I left with the feeling of being manipulated?  Because I think the screenplay set me up to not feel the loss of this “perfect” relationship too deeply, to spare me the true unhappy ending.  I don’t know, having not read the book, if the book sets you up in this way too, or if the relationship as shown in the book highlights the good and lets us get to know the “dream man” who here stood in the background of his fading marriage, his younger viril self, and ultimately his own demise.