Doing the Time Warp Again--and Again

Leaping forward, looking back, tripping back and forth, uniting past and present, time travel--both literally and figuratively--became one of last year’s dominant movie themes, a year in cinema that we might as well dub “2001: A Time Odyssey.”

In “Planet of the Apes,” man and ape ricochet throughout time to play the ultimate game of “Survivor,” getting closer in touch with their primal instincts. In “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” controlling time becomes the ultimate power play. In “Donnie Darko,” a troubled teen (Jake Gyllenhaal) glimpses the future to repair a rift in a parallel universe and to redeem his own existence. In “Black Knight,” a selfish medieval theme park employee (Martin Lawrence) discovers a sense of community by hurling back into the Middle Ages. In “Just Visiting,” a medieval count (Jean Reno) tumbles into the present, finds his descendant and turns back the clock on his fumbled marriage. In “Happy Accidents,” a time-traveling rebel (Vincent D’Onofrio) steps back nearly 500 years to find true love with a wary gal (Marisa Tomei) who has given up hope.

And in the recent “Kate & Leopold,” a Victorian nobleman (Hugh Jackman) falls through a portal on the Brooklyn Bridge to find true love with a contemporary marketing executive (Meg Ryan) who has no time for romance.

In keeping with the conventions of the time-travel genre, destinies are fulfilled with pretzel logic. But these aren’t mere fish-out-of-water stories; there’s more of a desperate urge to change history and make up for the sins of the past, as if time itself were running out.

“At least until Sept. 11, we felt impervious--a kind of irony in the way we viewed the world,” said “Kate & Leopold” director James Mangold. “What turned me on was making a wildly improbable premise and playing with real characters. Film is so magical in its ability to play with time. Film is about time. It’s inherent in the cut--we’re catapulted from one scene to another. The idea of co-mingling periods is fun in pointing out the differences.”

As if these time-travel stories weren’t enough, the year also gave us a subcategory of films that manipulated time with greater imagination: “Moulin Rouge” and “A Knight’s Tale” conjure anachronistic worlds in which rock and pop ring out like a bohemian rhapsody in the former and an extreme sports anthem in the latter. “From Hell” links past and present by making the case that Jack the Ripper gave birth to the murder and mayhem of the 20th century. And “Memento,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “Iris” travel back and forth through time to prove love’s endurance and the precious power of memory.

When you add to the mix such 2002 films as the remake of “The Time Machine” (Guy Pearce plays an American scientist from the 19th century who travels in time to prevent the death of his fiancee), “Possession” (the adaptation of the A.S. Byatt novel that also contrasts the Victorian era with our own) and “Clockstoppers” (a high school student freezes time and must figure out how to save his father), you begin to realize this trend runs much deeper.

“Moulin Rouge” director Baz Luhrmann certainly thinks so. “We are in a period--and have been for a while--where we are deeply interested in universality. It’s how we’ve chosen to examine our own social and economic realities. To look at our universality, we must look at ourselves from a distance. And when you have a quick look at where we are, who we are and what we’re doing, you find that time changes everything and yet the human condition remains the same.”

Cultural Factors Promote Nostalgia

Why this sudden interest in time-travel movies? The arrival of the new millennium? Nostalgia for the past? A vicarious impulse to erase the excesses of the 20th century?

Mangold attributes this trend to three cultural factors: the phenomenal success of “Titanic,” which opened the flood gates for period pieces; the World War II nostalgia wave ushered in by “Saving Private Ryan”; and the publication a few years back of “Timeline,” Michael Crichton’s novel about a historian who travels back to 14th century France to save his professor, which is being made into a movie next year starring Paul Walker (“The Fast and the Furious”) and directed by Richard Donner.

But are deeper forces at work as well? Ever since the transforming events of Sept. 11, there’s been a lot of talk about changing our lives to find deeper spiritual meaning. Reevaluating our priorities, reconsidering our options and reclaiming time, making it more worthwhile, now that we realize our lives could suddenly end with a swift terrorist attack.

For once the movies seem to have been ahead of us in anticipating this spiritual longing by focusing on the subject of time, urging us to shake off the irony and ennui and start reconnecting with each other in more caring and compassionate ways.

“What’s exciting about these time-travel movies is they allow you to explore human emotions,” said “Donnie Darko” director Richard Kelly. “They are ultimately existential works about the search for meaning in an agnostic world.”

In “Kate & Leopold,” postmodern detachment pales in comparison to Victorian gallantry; if we could only tear a page out of 19th century romance and courtship, then this would be a happier society. Jackman plays the perfect English gentleman: a forward-thinker weary of his own time who knows how to treat a lady. He’s also the inventor of the elevator who isn’t exactly blown away by 21st century technology. But he is blown away by the way we live our lives: “What has happened to the world?”

Meanwhile, “Donnie Darko” explores the genre in a disturbing new way. Gyllenhaal plays a paranoid schizophrenic at the end of the Reagan era visited by a strange 6-foot rabbit that’s nothing like Harvey, offering horrifying visions of things to come.

Only through a series of incomprehensibly destructive acts do we come to realize that this high school terrorist is more Christlike than antichrist.

And in the end, we are left with a surprising sense of serenity in knowing that we are all somehow connected.

“I’ve opened up a big Pandora’s box of ideas about choice and fate,” explained “Donnie Darko” director Kelly. “I wanted to do a coming-of-age story for my generation from the ‘80s.”

Channeling the Present Into the Past

“Moulin Rouge,” meanwhile, redefines the musical for a 21st century audience by channeling popular music of the 20th century through the bohemian revolution of Paris in 1899. The end of the 19th century was no more decadent or tumultuous than the end of the 20th century, Luhrmann posits, so why not reinvent the “Orphic” myth of love, art and death with a few silly love songs and “Hellzapoppin’” theatricality?

Whether or not you like the film, you can’t help being impressed by its boundless energy and sensory delights. Or cracking a smile when Ewan McGregor first breaks into “The Sound of Music” during a fit of inspiration.

There’s more of a haunting quality to “Memento,” “A.I.” and “Iris,” which use various time-tripping techniques to draw us closer to their protagonists and the search for meaning in their lives.

The slow reverse trajectory of “Memento” lulls us into the same kind of fatigue and confusion as its memory-impaired protagonist (Guy Pearce). He laboriously tries to solve his wife’s murder, but his inability to retain anything beyond the moment puts him in a continuous loop more horrifying than “Groundhog Day.” What undoubtedly has struck a chord with viewers is the feeling of sensory overload as well as the underlying denial of a painful past.

And say what you will about “A.I.,” but it’s an ambitious and uncompromising fable about the nature of fairy tales and parenting over the course of time. After enduring an eternity of pain and suffering, the robot boy (Haley Joel Osment) gets a second chance with the adoptive mother (Frances O’Connor) who abandoned him 2,000 years earlier.

In “Iris,” the 40-year love affair between famed novelist Iris Murdoch and husband John Bayley hurls back and forth between their early romance at Oxford in the 1950s (portrayed by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonnerville) and their harrowing ordeal when she is stricken with Alzheimer’s in the 1990s (portrayed by Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent).

The effect of crisscrossing time periods as well as memories not only reveals the shifting power struggle of their marriage but also the terror of losing one’s mind. At the same time, you sense their passionate codependency. While Murdoch lives somewhere up in the bohemian clouds, Bayley brings her down to earth with utmost tenderness.

A richer kind of crisscrossing occurs in the upcoming “Possession,” in which two contemporary literary scholars (Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart) uncover a secret love affair between two English poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle) from the Victorian era. As Paltrow and Eckhart plunge further into a Pandora’s box of passion while reading the other couple’s intimate letters and inhabiting many of the same places, they too eventually repeat history by falling in love.

Yet for all the repression associated with the Victorian era, the modern lovers are unable to express their feelings as openly as their predecessors, who do so obliquely through the beauty of poetry. But “Possession” reminds us there are secrets embedded in the past only time can unlock for us.

However, Simon Wells, the director of “The Time Machine” remake and the great-grandson of the book’s author, H.G. Wells, stresses the great paradox in trying to alter time: The very things that we think we can change, he believes, “are the things we can’t change and must accept.”