About Time (2013)

Film review #645

Director: Richard Curtis

SYNOPSIS: Tim learns from his Father that the men in his family have the ability to travel back in time. He uses this power to help improve his life, as his Father suggests, and upon meeting Mary, he does everything he can to make their relationship work…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: About Time is a 2013 sci-fi romantic comedy film. After a lacklustre New Year’s Eve party, Tim Lake learns from his Father that the men in his family (himself included) have the ability to travel back in time. He decides to use this power to improve his life by finding love. When he encounters Mary by chance, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship is perfect. The film focuses on using these powers within the range of the romance genre, and sidesteps a lot of the other issues that this power could address: Tim is clearly established from a well-off family that get along well, so has no real need to use his powers for money or the other typical things people would try to get if they had these powers. It pigeon-holes the film in only dealing with certain things, but it’s a romance film, so it should have a specific focus I suppose. When he meets Mary, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship goes right, but when he inadvertently changes the past so they never meet, he has to go back in time to try and meet her by “chance,” which means he learns where she is going to be at certain times. now, I suppose you could argue that this is “okay” since they already did meet naturally and hit it off before Tim changed the past, so arranging himself to meet her by chance is just him repeating what he had done, but there’s still this feeling of him being manipulative about the whole situation that just irks me, and remained with me throughout the film. The film never once raises this dilemma that he changed the past so he should maybe just deal with it, and just carries on as if it’s not really an issue. The fact also that Mary never finds out about his powers really makes the relationship very one-sided.

The film is, despite the film’s title, about love, and hinges on the developing relationship between the two main characters. Both Tim and Mary have some compatibility, and there’s certainly some charm in their interactions. The film offers us a fairly well-rounded picture of the couple, from their first meeting, to marriage and children. The film doesn’t really offer a climax of any sort, it just levels out as Tim learns to make the most of life one day at a time. All of the issues and problems faced throughout the film don’t really feed into this climax, and are often easily fixed by the whole time travel business so they never happened, and no one really develops via their mistakes. As mentioned, Tim and Mary have a certain amount of chemistry, and they deviate enough from the typical romance leads, but their quirky personalities that ramble on in that quirky fashion is not going to endear them to everyone, and even if you appreciate the charm their base awkwardness brings, it does get old after two hours. We don’t really get a sense of any of the other characters either; we get a narration introducing them at the beginning, and that serves to sum up their whole character throughout the film, so again there’s very little development or anything new than what is immediately established.

The film takes a bit of a shift towards the end as Tim’s Dad passes away, and Tim begins to go back to the past to speak with him before he no longer can. It offers a touching finale to the film, but also it just doesn’t really fit in with the romance between Tim and Mary, as the latter is pretty much side-lined. I get that Tim’s dad first introduced him to the power, and is a secret between them, so it kind of closes the circle of the films story, but it would have been nice for it to at least play more of a part throughout the film so everything is weaved together a bit better. It is at this point as well that the film just throws its own rules about time travel out of the window, having Tim go back visiting his father before he died and such. The film hand-waives the issue of a butterfly effect of altering the past away in the beginning, and as mentioned Tim never really has to deal with the consequences of his actions. The romance film is director Richard Curtis’s bread and butter, but adding in the time travel element creates a lot of issues, as I always say: if you’re going top have time travel in your film, you need to know how it works, or it will quickly unravel the whole film with plot-holes and the like.

About Time has enough charm and chemistry to carry out its duties as a romance film, but suffers from side-stepping the problems that time travel inevitably creates, and ignores addressing consequences in fear of disrupting its attempt at creating the perfect romance through the redoing of very specific moments. There’s a bit too much of holding the film together on vibes alone rather than exploring its premise with any amount of depth. It’s Richard Curtis doing what he does best, but lack of any real plot or development of the characters leaves little substance underneath. It hits the right notes when it needs to, but it’s quite muddled when it needs to how it got there. maybe it’s charm can carry you through the film, or, like me, maybe it just flounders a few times too many.