Adapting time in Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveler’s Wife

Abstract

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife was adapted to the big screen by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2009). In both media the plot is complex, and the adaptation can be defined a puzzle film. I aim to discuss how, in the complicated, perplexing succession of time travels, of entangled past, present and future events, the readers and the spectators can understand and reconstruct the story, and which techniques are adopted in the two media to help them. In the novel, which is similar to a fictional diary, temporal information are numerous and given explicitly to the readers, whereas in the film there are fewer and “relative” temporal clues. Paradoxically, it seems easier to understand the film story because in the cinematographic medium movement in time is visualized and translated through camera movements, and movements in different settings and bodies.