Verdict
Summary
A love story that hurts more than elates, Somewhere in Time is essentially about a man who checks into a hotel and never checks out. It’s purely about nostalgia and making love the first priority over anything else, even over one’s own health and well-being. In that sense, it’s rather shortsighted and depressing, ending on a really strange and dour note that I found to be conclusively anti-life and anti-present. The performances – especially Reeve’s – are totally convincing and sincere, and the love story is very much center stage, as it were. The plot might not quite add up in a logical way, but Richard Matheson’s script (based on a story he wrote) tries to make sense of the psychology of time travel as it is presented in a very anti-technological way. It’s interesting for time travel fans, but it just doesn’t quite add up. Still, the film is quite lovely to look at and listen to with a typically beautiful John Barry score.
Plot:
A playwright figures out how to travel back in time and meets the love of his life.
Review:
When Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) is celebrating the release of his first play in college, he is approached by an old woman who hands him a timepiece and tells him to “come find her,” and then she walks away, leaving a strange impression on him. Less than ten years later, Richard is a celebrated and wealthy playwright, but nothing is right in his soul, and so he goes for a drive, alone, and ends up at a seaside hotel where he walks around and he sees a photograph of a beautiful woman on a wall, and suddenly he’s transfixed by her, as if she is somehow – impossibly – intrinsic to his destiny. He goes to a library and researches her: She was Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), a world-renown stage actress, perhaps the greatest of her generation, and she died on the very day the old woman approached him all those years ago. He realizes with stark clarity that the two women were one and the same, which leads him to believe that somehow they knew each other long, long ago, which would be literally impossible … or is it? When Richard meets a professor at the nearby college who swears that time travel is possible – by using intense meditation and not technology – Richard goes all-in and prepares himself by wearing a very old suit that might’ve been stylish in 1912, when Elise McKenna was performing a play near the hotel, and he packs with him some currency of the era, and lo and behold, he’s able to slip through time, leaving his body behind in 1979 and somehow move back through time (logic must be discarded to accept this) to exactly the moment he wishes to go. Fate has him meeting Elise, and true to his encounter later on when he was a younger man, he and Elise fall deeply in love with each other over the course of a day and a night, but a cruel twist has him yanked back to his body in 1979 just when the two of them were ready to begin their lives together, leading him to contemplate a second and final trip back to 1912, or some other ethereal realm where nothing else matters except love …
A love story that hurts more than elates, Somewhere in Time is essentially about a man who checks into a hotel and never checks out. It’s purely about nostalgia and making love the first priority over anything else, even over one’s own health and well-being. In that sense, it’s rather shortsighted and depressing, ending on a really strange and dour note that I found to be conclusively anti-life and anti-present. The performances – especially Reeve’s – are totally convincing and sincere, and the love story is very much center stage, as it were. The plot might not quite add up in a logical way, but Richard Matheson’s script (based on a story he wrote) tries to make sense of the psychology of time travel as it is presented in a very anti-technological way. It’s interesting for time travel fans, but it just doesn’t quite add up. Still, the film is quite lovely to look at and listen to with a typically beautiful John Barry score. From director Jeannot Szwarc.
Kino Lorber’s new 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray combo pack for Somewhere in Time looks gorgeous in a new 4K scan from the original camera negative, and the film ports over previous special features included on Universal’s Special Collector’s Edition DVD, which include a commentary by Szwarc, a documentary about the making of the film, featurettes, and the trailer, but new features include two new audio commentaries, one by author Tim Lucas, and another commentary by several film historians. There’s also a slipcover.
