Somewhere in Time

August 26, 2012 - A bad penny totally ruins Christopher Reeve's chance at happiness with the woman he loves in this time-traveling romance from 1980. Jane Seymour is the object of his affection, while Christopher Plummer tries everything he can think of to keep the lovers apart.

Reeve plays Richard Collier, a successful playwright haunted by an encounter with an elderly woman. On the night his first play opened, she approached him, handed him a pocket watch and said, "Come back to me." Then, she walked away. Several years and several plays later, Collier is a success but he has a bad case of writer's block. He jumps in his car and soon finds himself checking into a famous hotel near where he went to college.

While waiting for the dining room to open, he checks out the hotel's museum, and that's where he sees a photograph of a beautiful woman. He learns that her name is Elise McKenna and that she was a famous actress back in the early 20th century. Collier becomes so obsessed with her that he uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time to 1912 so that he can meet Elise and get her to fall in love with him. Surprisingly, it all works out rather well until Collier decides to show Elise all the fancy pockets in his jacket.

Overall review: ** This was Reeve's first film after Superman, and he couldn't have picked a movie or a character that were more different. If you can suspend belief and buy into the whole self-hypnosis-time-travel-teleportation thing, the movie's actually pretty good. Mostly what I had trouble buying into was the idea of Collier, played by a well-built, 6'4" Reeve, obsessing over a woman to the point of dying from a broken heart.