Somewhere in Time

Imagine that someone from the past could suddenly appear in your life and draw you into a drama that you never imagined could exist for you but is as much apart of you as things which you believe you have a handle on. Imagine loving the image of someone long gone so much so that you find a way to cross the boundaries of time to reach them. The theme of obsession and love of people through their images in paintings and photographs is very common in film. “Vertigo” and “Laura” and god knows how many movies feature characters falling in love with people in this way. But there is only one that I know of where a character travels back in time to meet the woman he falls in love with in a photograph only to discover through the process of his journey that she has been with him all along.

“Somewhere in Time” is one of only two movies I know starring Christopher Reeve where he’s not flying around in blue tights and a red cape. The other is “Street Smart.” The wonder that he conveys, the innocence, the love and desire for Jane Seymour’s character in "Somewhere in Time" gives me goose bumps every time I watch it.
Time travel and the strength of love are among some of my favorite movie themes. To me, Dracula is in part a story of time travel for love. “Somewhere in Time” achieves this in a wonderfully genuine and magical way. And the entire process of making the movie for the cast, the crew, producers, everyone was a labor of love straight through. And you can see that in the finished product.

Something about the way Reeve's character dies (sorry, but this won’t spoil it for those who have never seen the movie) and Christopher Reeves accident and his eventual death in real life seems inextricably linked to me when I watch it now. In the special features, when he does commentary he is already in the wheel chair that his accident confined him to. He relates an actual near death experience that he had due to a bad drug interaction. He literally flat lined for 50 seconds. This validated the scene in the movie for him, which he had some doubt about when he was filming it. So essentially he died before he died before he died. The exploration of death is one of my favorite movie themes as well.

I look at Christopher Reeve now and I wonder more about him, about who he was behind all that Superman stuff, who he was as an actor. We will never know what he was truly capable of as a performer but I suspect that as an actor his achievements only scratched the surface of his potential.