It was Pauline Kael who said “melodrama with a fast pace can
be much more exciting - and more honest, too - than feeble pretentious attempts
at drama.” So it is with About Time,
the new film from Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Love Actually, that sentimental hydra-headed Christmastime romantic
comedy that some say drowns in sappiness as if that’s a bad thing. His new film is a romance about falling in love with
a woman, but even more so about falling in love with life itself, helped along
by important relationships and Big Moments – births, deaths, weddings, funerals
– that make one stop and appreciate time as it goes by. To this is added a
light dusting of high concept sci-fi that’s at once easily digestible and, just
below the surface, as incomprehensible as any time travel plotting can grow
when one stares at it for too long. But anyway, this isn’t a movie that one
experiences with the head, intending to chart it out for one’s date afterwards,
arranging straws into timelines on the dinner table. This is a movie that
socked me in the heart early and often, terrifically emotionally manipulative
and much more involving than feebler fare.
It starts with Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, a Weasley son) turning
21 and learning a family secret, so secret neither his mother (Lindsay Duncan)
nor sister (Lydia Wilson) knows. His father (Bill Nighy) calls him into his
study, sits him down, and says that all the men in his family can travel
through time. “It’s not a joke,” he so flatly states it must be true. With this
information comes knowledge of the ability’s restrictions, learned, we’re meant
to assume, through generations of trial and error. He can only travel within
the space of his own lifetime. He can only travel backwards, other than
returning to the present, of course. He can only return to places and times he
knows. To achieve this feat, he simply has to stand in the dark, clench his
fists, and think his way there.
It all sounds so simple, and in practice it is. The film
uses the sci-fi hook to power its storytelling and uses the rules to keep the
plot from spinning out of control. It’s silliness treated if not literally
seriously, than emotionally seriously. It helps that Nighy is such a warm
presence, eager in his fatherly insistence on ethical uses of time travel. Look
not for riches or manipulations, he says, but for generating more chances to do
what you love. What’s he done with this gift? He says he has found more reading
time, mostly.
Tim wants a girlfriend and at first sets about creating his
own personal Groundhog Day in order
to gather information to woo his crushes. Once he realizes that no matter how
often he tries to redo moments to make them just right, others will behave in
unpredictable ways, he simply moves on with his life. He moves to London, gets
a low level job at a law firm, meets new friends, and falls in love at first
sight with a young woman (Rachel McAdams, exuding sunny appeal) he meets by
pure coincidence. In this story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl by going back
inadvertently changing their meeting. He erases it, in fact.
He must win her back by going back, using his powers not to
control, but only to be a better flirt and a better lover. He’ll still redo
social stumbles, but he’s just as likely to jump back and relive a great
moment. There’s a funny bit where he selfishly relives a Big Deal three times,
and then is too exhausted to go again when McAdams asks him to. He
time-traveled and didn’t even have to.
As the film progresses through moments romantic, comedic,
and dramatic, it builds up a picture of a young man learning to come to terms
with the finite nature of life. Sometimes the story will even take a break from
its mild sci-fi possibilities and go for a stretch without bringing up its
central premise at all, playing out as tasteful, sentimental melodrama. It
works on that level quite nicely. Principally a romance between two characters
rather charmingly portrayed (Domhnall and McAdams have an on-screen connection
that instantly provoked my rooting interest) this is a movie full of tender,
warm, heartfelt moments of swooping, swooning true love and all that mushy
stuff. It’s a movie about learning to experience life as it happens instead of
always striving for some ideal life you feel you aren’t living, but could be or
should be.
About Time uses
its modest time travel trappings not as plot mechanics, but as metaphor for
learning how to manage and truly appreciate the time you have with those who
love you. It’s a warm and fuzzy movie that tells comfortable, but no less
moving, truths. It has the romance of a cozy rom com, the philosophy of a
greeting card, and the sentimentality of a life insurance commercial. But the
combination comes together so wonderfully that it won me over all the same.
It’s all a slick and lovely artifice through which Curtis can movingly and
sweetly find some great emotional resonances. A lush piano score that dances
around the tune of one of my favorite Ben Folds songs ties together a story
that’s small in scope, telling only of one young man’s maturation through
complications both romantic and temporal. And yet its syrupy life-affirming
implications are so grandly expressive. It’s a movie of broad feeling and
overflowing heart.
Note: This is
undoubtedly the mildest R-rated film I’ve seen in quite some time. It has a
handful of stronger profanities deployed tastefully and a few non-explicit
references to sex. Why that’s not considered a PG-13 here when I’ve seen worse
in PG-13s past (in trailers, even), is beyond me.
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