“What emerges in the back half of About Time is a surprisingly sweet and earnest meditation on the pangs and fears of growing up and starting a family.” —Warren Zhang
I have a hate-tolerate-hate relationship with writer-director Richard Curtis’s films. While I found Love Actually mildly pleasant, I loathed Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and especially Pirate Radio.
Thus, it was with little hope that I walked into his latest feature, About Time, and discovered, to my dismay, that the first half largely met these expectations. The story, as it is oh so tweely summarized by its cutesy title, is about time, specifically time travel.
Domhnall Gleeson (Anna Karenina) stars as a vaguely disaffected British youth who discovers on his 21st birthday that all the male members of his family can travel through time. He uses these powers as any male protagonist in a high-concept romantic comedy, and indeed many actual guys, probably would: to get lucky.
Enter Rachel McAdams (To the Wonder), an American woman with a fringe and that unique female rom-com protagonist trait of being utterly one-dimensional. Gleeson screws up the first time they meet. He hits rewind a couple of times, and eventually they meet cute and hit it off.
Right around then, I was ready to leave the theater and chalk it up as another insipid Curtis flick. But About Time winds up doing something a little different. Whereas most rom-coms would have Gleeson eventually get in trouble with McAdams for using his powers before having to renounce them to win over the lady, nothing of the sort goes down in About Time.
Instead, the movie meanders in the best way possible. The film’s time line stretches far longer than you’d expect as Gleeson and McAdams get married, have kids and start settling down. What emerges in the back half of About Time is a surprisingly sweet and earnest meditation on the pangs and fears of growing up and starting a family.
Eventually, the time travel gimmick — which, by the way, is not internally consistent at all — gets used as a tool for reconfiguring bog-standard father-son cliches into surprisingly affecting little moments.
Bill Nighy (The World’s End) really sells his role as Gleeson’s father. At first blush, he is the usual snappy, emotionally reserved Brit, but eventually Nighy (with help from Curtis’s script) sheds his layers of sarcasm to reveal a noble but deeply insecure and afraid inner self.
About Time still has a considerable amount of problems in its back half. The nature of the story means that there’s virtually no coherent through line, so events unfurl without discipline or rhythm. The story also ends on a didactic, moralizing beat that it doesn’t quite earn. The images are uniformly ugly, either because the digital cameras lack the dynamic range needed to capture skin tones as anything other than sickly yellow or because the cinematographer phoned it in.
None of the female characters amount to much beyond the standard flat, reactive objects of affection. The shallow characterization leads to a particularly troubling, uneven sequence involving Gleeson and his sister but is otherwise only a massive flaw in retrospect.
Come to think of it, the rom-com elements of this alleged rom-com are all utterly superfluous. A movie about Gleeson creepily replaying encounters over and over again until he finally beds McAdams is not one I want to see.
A movie about lovely, quiet moments, such as the birth of a child set to “Spiegel im Spiegel” or a son gently devastating his seemingly aloof father? Now that’s something I want to see.
