Heiress Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams, left) falls in love with a time traveler named Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana, right) who keeps vanishing in the Time Traveler's Wife. (Warner Bros.)

In The Time Traveler’s Wife, Henry (Eric Bana) has attendance issues. Since he was a small child and saw his mother die in a car accident, he occasionally, spontaneously, fades from the present, his body disappearing top-down like a tilted glass being emptied. Then he’s plunked elsewhere, buck naked, and either younger or older, in some past or future corner of his life.

For all the declarations of a scorching, time-space-continuum-spanning love story, Bana and McAdams have only one (bland) sex scene, which fails to exploit their abundant beauty.

Clare (Rachel McAdams) has witnessed Henry’s cameos since she was six, playing in the field behind her parents’ house. One day, a graying, middle-aged Henry time-traveled to the little girl’s shrubbery, and she gallantly lent him her picnic blanket to cover his privates. Thus began a years-long friendship with both parties cheerfully oblivious to the creepy, pedophilic overtones of a guy from the bushes chumming around with a little girl: Shhh, don’t tell your daddy about our “unique” relationship — but thanks for stealing his argyle sweater for me to wear.

Love finally blossoms when Henry and Clare at last meet on the same chronological terms, Benjamin Button-style, in their 20s. Romance turns into marriage, but it’s not always easy to be the title, married to a guy who randomly vanishes and reappears. “Did I miss Christmas?” asks Henry when he shows up in the apartment one winter. “I had a really hard time getting back,” he says earnestly, in one of many unintentionally hilarious pieces of dialogue.

As Henry tries to explain, when he is “away,” it’s not exactly laissez les bon temps roulez. He mostly breaks into places in search of clothing (fans of Bana’s haunches will get their fill), and is inevitably hunted down by police or criminals. There’s loneliness in Henry’s singularity. He walks the streets held hostage by his condition, waiting to go home. This is the film’s most poignant idea, albeit one that’s been well worn in the recent glut of vampire stories: the gift that is a curse that makes all romance tragic.

Clare and Henry try to keep their relationship stable in the Time Traveler's Wife. (Warner Bros.)

The Time Traveler’s Wife is based on the bestseller and book-club favourite by Audrey Niffenegger. Perhaps screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin assumes that means every person who passes into a theatre will have read the book — I have not — and so will be instantly cheering what is presented as the love story of the century. But from their first meeting, Henry and Clare seem more enamoured of their own mythology — You’re the time traveler, and I’m the girl you stalked! Ain’t it romantic? — than each other.

McAdams does heartsick with aplomb, but Bana — after such an appealing, self-deprecating turn in Funny People — mostly plays it perplexed, brow furrowed and lips pursed. For all the declarations of a scorching, time-space-continuum-spanning love story, the pair has only one (bland) sex scene, which fails to exploit the excess of physical beauty on screen.

In fact, it’s not just the sex that’s drab; the production design of the film is incongruously low budget. Looking for cues as to the decade, or the year, in which Henry finds himself, is fruitless. (A Pavement poster will alert only the most diehard Stephen Malkmus fans to one mid-’90s scene.) The characters, spanning about 20 years, look almost exactly the same no matter when Henry pops up. As if there were no eye makeup on set, hair is the sole measure of time’s passage as Henry’s unflattering, youthful mullet shifts to a few strands of grey. Meanwhile, poor Clare vacillates inconsistently between downtown artist and frump, entering her late 30s totally defeated in mom jeans and sweater sets. Couldn’t Henry travel back in time and bring home some episodes of What Not to Wear?

As often happens with the time travel theme, the plot holes have holes, and those holes have holes, too. In The Time Traveler’s Wife, a scientific diagnosis involving electromagnetic convulsions and epileptic fits is quickly abandoned. The twist is that Henry can’t change the past, only witness it. But later, someone else claims to be able to control time travel. So why doesn’t that character go back and alter the story’s central tragedy?

All these holes make for a big doily of a mess. One might be able to forgive the film for abandoning sci-fi reason if the love story was convincing, but love without logic or magic is best traveled past.

The Time Traveler’s Wife opens Aug. 14.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.