About Time
A cheesy rom-com gimmick is elevated into a tear-jerking father-son story.
When the trailer says From the Writer of Love Actually, you have an idea of what to expect—dry humor romance of a lanky loser who gets a girl way out of his league. About Time also boasted a predictable premise that seems more fitting for a Youtube short instead of a full-length movie—an awkward boy uses time-travel to cycle through embarrassing mishaps until he gets it right and wins the girl. It is another Groundhog Day kind of movie.
And that is what you get for the first half of the movie. Richard Curtis is a talented enough writer/director and a well-rounded, relatable cast (Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy) to keep it fresh and engaging. As usual, his characters are just quirky enough. But the first half is what you would expect.
When the movie was released, critics concentrated on the time travel, the resulting plot holes, and inconsistent rules. It was also unfavorably compared to other Richard Curtis rom-coms like Bridget Jones, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Love Actually. But I think this is looking at the film in the wrong way. Time travel is always going to be tricky and cause holes, so I have to accept that going in. And the film was not meant to be simple, sweet, and innocent like Notting Hill.
Because what makes the movie great is the shift in tone and focus midway through.
The movie plays through just about every predictable use of the time-travel gambit for the sake of romance and comedy in the first half, culminating in the wedding of Gleeson's Tim and McAdams’s Mary. Then there is a shift in dynamic. Tim and Mary become settled and happy, and you almost forget about the bumbling process it took for them to end up together. They are just a happy couple now. The focus of the story then transitions to other relationships in Tim’s life—his sister, his job, and primarily his father.
This latter half is the strongest. The side characters of Tim’s family that I had originally written off as the typical wacky supporting cast in Richard Curtis’s rom-coms are brought the front and fleshed out. The oddball, free spirit sister is revealed to be a lost and dangerously depressed spirit. Bill Nighy is at his best as Tim’s father, whose character name I forget because it's just Nighy being cool, suave, and witty. But he gets to play a dad who knows the future and has been on a mission to spend as many years as he can relive with his son.
The time-travel trope is no longer a tool but an obstacle as well. It is less of a silly concept. It’s not just a gimmick. Going back to fix or change something is given more real consequences than just embarrassing himself in front of Rachel McAdams. Tim’s efforts to control time, slow it down, and savor it for the sake of his dad is a tear-jerking and relatable story—added to the end of a predictable romantic comedy.
In some ways, I wish more of the runtime was dedicated to these relationships but I will always appreciate the movie for surprising me so much. It stands out as one of the best-executed shifts in tone. It doesn’t feel like an unnecessary subplot or a comedy that suddenly wants to be taken seriously. The supporting characters are introduced in such a way that you want to know more about them and are happy when the story pivots to them.
About Time is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t