Somewhere in Time is a deeply romantic movie filled with longing glances, passionate embraces, and grand declarations of love. It is also terribly sad. The type of film to make a grown man cry. It is also the kind of film where I wonder if there isn’t something wrong with me, for I find myself completely unmoved by it all.
Buy Somewhere in TimeRichard Collier (Christopher Reeve) is celebrating the release of his new play. An elderly woman approaches him, hands him an old gold watch, and whispers “Come back to me” in his ear. Then promptly leaves.
Eight years later, he’s experiencing a bit of writer’s block. To clear his mind, he takes a ride. He feels compelled to stop at the Grand Hotel. Inside the hotel’s Hall of History, he becomes enchanted by an old picture of Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), an actress who performed there in 1912. He becomes completely obsessed with this woman and, through diligent research, learns that she was the one who gave him that watch. He learns where she lives and visits her house only to discover that she died on the night she visited him. He also learned that she was a huge fan of a book about time travel.
A quick visit with the author of the book, and he learns that all he needs to do to travel back in time and visit with this woman is remove anything associated with the present from his room, put on an old suit and hat, and then wish really hard.
That is as silly as it sounds, but it works. Richard finds himself back in time. The film doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of that. How exactly thinking about it makes you time travel, or what happens to his body in the present day, so we won’t either.
He locates Elsa, and they share a romance. She seems to have been waiting for him to come. There is a bit of a challenge in the form of Elsa’s manager, William Fawcett Robinson (Christopher Plummer), who becomes jealous of Richard, not in a romantic sense but because he fears she’ll get distracted by him and toss her acting career to the wayside. But nothing can stop their love from blossoming. Well, except maybe the confluence of time.
Here’s where I get back to how unmoved I was by it all. New romance is a tricky thing for cinema to do correctly. In some ways, the movies are the perfect art to make us feel the resplendence of romance. With soft-focus images, swooning music, and a wonderful actor saying beautiful words. But movies have to tell their story within a relatively short amount of time. Most people don’t fall completely, head-over-heels in love within a couple of hours. At least, I don’t anyhow. I find it hard to believe anyone can fall in love so quickly, even if the film takes place over several days or weeks – what we see on the screen is what we get.
Somewhere in Time‘s version of romance is to have the characters stare at each other with longing looks. They embrace in slow motion. They prolong their kisses. It is all lit by candlelight. Romantic music swells. They don’t actually do a lot of talking. You have to believe these two are in love by the way they look at each other. Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour were very attractive people and fine actors. They do their best to sell the romance, and it’s not that they do a bad job of it, but I just don’t find myself buying it. Or perhaps I just don’t care enough about these characters that I’m not invested in how it will end.
I would have been more interested if they’d explored the time travel aspects a bit. Perhaps Richard had to move back and forth through time. Maybe every time he came back it would be later in her timeline. Or something. But that’s not what this is. It is a romance with a time-travel twist. One can’t force a movie to be what you want it to be. But one can criticize what it actually is. And what Somewhere in Time is isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not for me.
Kino Lorber presents Somewhere in Time with a new 4K restoration of the original camera negative. It comes with a UHD disc and a standard Blu-ray.
Extras include three audio commentaries. One by critic Tim Lucas, another featuring Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff, and the third by director Jeannot Szwarc. Also included is “Somewhere in Time,” an hour-long documentary on the film; a fan club featurette; and the film’s trailer.
