ABOUT TIME (2013)

Genre: Romance/Comedy
Director: Richard Curtis
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Margot Robbie
RunTime: 2 hrs 3 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Some Nudity)
Released By: UIP
Official Website: http://www.abouttimemovie.com/
 
Opening Day: 10 October 2013

Synopsis: At the age of 21, Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel in time… The night after another unsatisfactory New Year party, Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) tells his son that the men in his family have always had the ability to travel through time. Tim can’t change history, but he can change what happens and has happened in his own life—so he decides to make his world a better place...by getting a girlfriend. Sadly, that turns out not to be as easy as you might think. Moving from the Cornwall coast to London to train as a lawyer, Tim finally meets the beautiful but insecure Mary (Rachel McAdams). They fall in love, then an unfortunate time-travel incident means he’s never met her at all. So they meet for the first time again—and again—but finally, after a lot of cunning time-traveling, he wins her heart. Tim then uses his power to create the perfect romantic proposal, to save his wedding from the worst best-man speeches, to save his best friend from professional disaster and to get his pregnant wife to the hospital in time for the birth of their daughter, despite a nasty traffic jam outside Abbey Road. But as his unusual life progresses, Tim finds out that his unique gift can’t save him from the sorrows and ups and downs that affect all families, everywhere. There are great limits to what time travel can achieve, and it can be dangerous too. About Time is a comedy about love and time travel, which discovers that, in the end, making the most of life may not need time travel at all.

Movie Review:

Speak of time-travel romances and the one that probably comes to mind is Audrey Niffenegger’s ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’, but if you’d ask us to pick our favourite among the two, we’d undoubtedly choose Richard Curtis’ ‘About Time’. Bearing only the minimalist of conceptual similarities, Curtis’ first to employ a supernatural twist isn’t just a rom-com like his earlier classics ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, ‘Notting Hill’ or his directorial debut ‘Love Actually’; rather, it rises above escapist fluff as a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on embracing life as a mixed bag of ups and downs, of good and bad, of life and death.

Curtis approaches the potentially tricky concept of time-travel as wish fulfilment - indeed, how often have we wondered about the ability to go back in time to erase our embarrassments, to right our wrongs or simply just to make things a little more perfect?  That’s exactly how our sweet and slightly shy geeky protagonist Tim (Domhnall Glesson) greets his hereditary gift upon learning about it from his dad (Bill Nighy) on his twenty-first birthday and also informs him to use it wisely - unlike some of his male ancestors, who literally gambled it away.

Whilst more career-ambitious young men might have used that gift to chase fame or fortune, Tim settles for a real shot at romance. Stepping into what is essentially known as the Hugh Grant role in Curtis’ rom-coms, Tim recognises his deficiencies at wooing members of the opposite sex - and in his sister’s friend Charlotte (Margot Robbie), who is staying with the family for the summer holidays, he gets his first test subject. Unfortunately, he also gets to learn the first lesson about time travel - if love ain’t meant to be, no amount of travelling back in time is going to help one bit.

Though mentioned in passing, it is but the first little nuggets of wisdom about love that Curtis drops throughout the movie; after all, much as we blame the circumstances, maybe who we do not end up with remains just that no matter the externalities. Tim’s fate in love changes several months later though when he goes on a blind date in a pitch-dark restaurant and shares a meet-cute with an American publisher Mary (Rachel McAdams). We know they will end up together, but Curtis keeps up some measure of suspense by forcing the clock on rewind when Tim’s overzealously helpful personality pretty much eliminates that brilliant beginning.

And so we get not only but three meet-cute encounters between Tim and Mary, which after the last one - sans a little unexpected run-in with Charlotte - their love story is pretty much sealed.  Rather than confine the narrative to a certain period of their lives, Curtis goes for the long haul, covering not just their dating, but also their marriage and early parenthood years. Here is also where it gets interesting - instead of his usual boy-meets-girl plot, Curtis switches gears to bring Tim’s idiosyncratic family back into sharp focus.

There’s his retired academic of a Dad (Bill Nighy), a charming patriarch with a wry sense of humour, his gardening enthusiast of a Mom (Lindsay Duncan) who never quite lets up from a sombre demeanour; his ditsy younger sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) who is trapped in a poisoned relationship with a no-gooder boyfriend; and lastly his mentally challenged Uncle D (Richard Cordery). Tim and Mary’s lives are intertwined with theirs on the virtue of being family, and Curtis uses their respective predicaments to bring across poignantly what it means to live a full life.

We’ll grant that not all will lap up his detour into melodramatic territory here, but Curtis handles the journey with such deftness and finesse that we cannot help but be genuinely moved. The lesson here about moving on, letting go and living each moment in life as if it were your only chance to do so isn’t new, but there is such effusive warmth and tenderness in the way Curtis guides his protagonist - and as well his audience - to learn of the ultimate futility of editing out the awkward and painful moments of life. Especially touching is Tim’s relationship with his dad in the last half hour of the movie, as the latter advises the former to accept life by simply living each day twice - first to experience it, and then again to savour it.

As always, Curtis has a knack for finding the right pair of stars for his movies, and one could not imagine a better pair of leads than Gleeson and McAdams. There is such a radiant chemistry about them that never for a moment do they seem less than believable, and nowhere is this more evident than in a series of vignettes of their first night sexual encounter which Tim uses his powers to transform from ‘pretty nice’ to ‘pretty awesome’. Curtis also surrounds them with wonderful supporting bits, in particular the delightfully witty Nighy and the self-deprecating curmudgeon of a playwright whom Tim stays with in London played by Tom Hollander.

For all its flaws - a somewhat indulgent running time which could have been shortened for pace or a rather episodic storytelling quality - ‘About Time’ is one of our most beloved Richard Curtis rom-coms because it isn’t just a film about some make-believe romance we all wished we lived through but are equally keenly aware of how impossible it is, but rather an ode to life in all its bittersweet moments, the ones we want to treasure and live in forever and the ones that we so instinctively desire to let go. There is hardly any question in Curtis’ claim that this is his most personal film yet, and there is something truly beautiful about a movie that makes you value the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the good times and the bad in your life more. 

Movie Rating:

(Prepare your hankies - Richard Curtis returns not simply with a distinctly British rom-com, but a poignant and heartfelt ode to the bitter and the sweet moments in life)

Review by Gabriel Chong