Eric Bana, last seen taking it to the terrorists in Steven Spielberg’s masterful Munich (and soon to be dumped into theaters along with Curtis Hanson’s long-delayed professional poker movie, Lucky You), has signed on to star in Robert Schwentke’s big screen transfer of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife – as The Time Traveller, not The Wife. (I didn’t think it was funny, either.) No, the estrogen will be supplied by the lovely, talented and awfully choosy Rachel McAdams, who, after her breakthrough 2005, hasn’t been seen since, and probably won’t be seen again until 2008 in Ira Sachs’s Married Life and, of course, this.
As for what "this" is, all I know is that there are lots of tear stained copies of it gathering cat hair on lots of single chicks’ night stands (I suppose married women who won’t put out for their husbands have copies handy as well). The novel tells the lushly romantic story of Henry De Tamble, "a rather dashing librarian" (i.e. sexually uninterested gay best friend) who suffers from some goofy disorder that makes him travel back and forth in time. This is a huge pain in the ass for De Tamble because he can’t control when he’ll disappear or when he’ll return. And when he does reappear, he’s usually naked. This sounds like the pussy version of The Terminator I never knew I never wanted to see.
Schwentke’s a big question mark as a director, having only distinguished himself commercially with the profitable Jodie Foster vehicle Flightplan. Though the story sounds like it’s headed in the same tear-jerking direction as Somewhere in Time, Schwentke’s at least got two of Hollywood’s smartest writers of swoony sci-fi, Bruce Joel Rubin and Jeremy Leven, adapting for him.
The film is set up at New Line with Dem Plan B Boys, Brad Pitt and Nick Wechsler, producing.