Released this week on DVD: "The Time Traveler's Wife"

Grade: C

"I’m a time traveler. I come from the future. And I don’t get to bring my clothes."

That about explains everything, doesn’t it?

A kooky, head-spinning romantic mess, The Time Traveler’s Wife stars Eric Bana as the naked time traveler and Rachel McAdams as the bright-eyed Chicagoan who has known the guy since she was a little girl.

A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife is about the timelessness of true love, about the intersection of fate and chance, and about how it’s possible to be in two places at once, or be in the same place twice, and still not be able to show up for dinner.

Acting is all about finding the "truth" in a character and a situation, and delivering your lines with conviction — becoming the part. I kept thinking about Bana, as his Henry goes caroming around from his young 20s to this mid-30s, meeting up with Clare when she’s a wee, wide-eyed lass (played by the charming Brooklynn Prouix) or with McAdams’ Clare as she stumbles on Henry one day in the Chicago Public Library. Henry doesn’t remember Clare then, but that doesn’t stop her from announcing that "I’ve known you since I was 6 years old" and inviting him to meet at his favorite Thai eatery. How could the actor keep a straight face? How could she? Isn’t there a point on the space-time continuum where the mawkish hooey and moonstruck inanity collide to form an implosion of cosmic implausibility?

With a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, a veteran writer with a special expertise in the spiritual and paranormal (Ghost, Jacob’s Ladder), and directed by the German-gone-Hollywood Robert Schwentke, The Time Traveler’s Wife is astounding for the plodding, leaden approach it takes to this wild, woolly idea.

Henry has a genetic defect, you see, a "chrono-impairment" that causes him to slip off without warning to other times, other places. He leaves his clothes in a puddle at his feet and arrives wherever in his birthday suit. It’s embarrassing for him, for sure, but fine for the Australian hunk’s fans watching at home. (It’s shocking the lengths Henry will go to clothe himself, however, once he’s reached his new destination: He smashes the windows of locked cars, he burglarizes offices and shops. Is this any kind of message to send to our chrono-impaired youth?)

I haven’t read Niffenegger’s book, so I could be wrong about this, but The Time Traveler’s Wife might just be a clever bodice-ripping metaphor about boyfriends and husbands who can’t commit to a relationship, who will fly off at a moment’s notice, dodging responsibilities and appointments with the in-laws.

And parenting? Forget about it. Who needs to hang around raising a kid when you can go running through the trees, as clothesless and carefree as a monkey with a time machine?