In the new Richard Curtis movie About Time – out Friday in American theatres – a young British man named Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) is taken aside by his father (Bill Nighy) and invited in on the family secret: the men in the family can travel back in time.
They do this by going to nearest cupboard, clenching their fists tightly and thinking of the time period in question. Only from their own life, mind — “I can’t kill Hitler, or shag Helen of Troy,” sighs Nighy, with that wispy, bone-dry delivery that allows him to speak without moving his mouth. But that New Year's Eve party where you didn't kiss the girl? Back you pop and plant one on her.
Or that nice young American with a job in publishing and a fringe she keeps tugging self-consciously, with whom you spent a delightful evening only to lose her number? Go back and troll a few of her favourite hangouts, in this case a gallery of Kate Moss photographs, which in Richard Curtis’s Britain’s is clearly the thing everyone simply must have an opinion about (“the important thing is the sense of history”), the same way everyone in Annie Hall had an opinion about modern art.
Admittedly, Mary (Rachel McAdams) doesn’t know Tim from Adam — and his attempts to insert her own opinions into the conversation come across as even more deeply creepy than a man offering opinions about Kate Moss might usually be — but McAdams is probably used to it by now. This makes three time-travel movies for her, after The Time Traveler’s Wife and Midnight in Paris. I’ve always been one of her staunchest defenders — she’s a burst of mint in a cinematic landscape dominated by take-me-to-the-dark-side brooders and self-bruisers — although I’d be the first to admit that nothing about the girl screams “rifts in the space-time continuum”. McAdams has had so many time-travellers professing their undying love, she must be longing for someone who never leaves her own historical period.
No such luck – she gets Tim. At first glance Gleeson, with his beanpole physique, mop of red hair and self-esteem crawling around somewhere in the basement, seems like a Hugh Grant manqué. But he grows on you. Gleeson’s face is an endearing battleground of fretfulness and effrontery, and he has a fine way of following statements with a slight wince, as if incredulous at whatever has just trotted out of his mouth.
This, after all, is the Curtis trick: to push a race of people – the British – to a place beyond their natural reticence levels – the romcom – and watch them square up to the bat. (In this sense, all of his movies are fish-out-of-water movies.) Now, after taking time off to direct a couple of misfires, Love Actually and Pirate Radio (known in the UK as The Boat That Rocked), Curtis has made a return to some sort of form, and even found time for a little homework. In place of the tightly-wound farce of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which came with Wet Wet Wet on the soundtrack, we get some Nick-Hornby-inflected alt-rock tracks featuring tremulous males singing over wistfully out-of-tune pianos. We even get handheld camerawork and beaches. Someone has been re-watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The conceit runs out of gas at the halfway mark, as always seems the case with these movies, but it’s fun while it lasts. Tim chats up Amy at the Kate Moss exhibition, only to find she has recently acquired a boyfriend. So he goes back in time to gazump him. Upon getting her into bed, he fumbles with her bra strap. So he nips back and smoothly seduces her all over again. And so on. The appeal of this sort of clockmaker comedy is the smooth plank it extends over the bubbling hotbed of “what ifs” and “if onlys” that bedevil the average suitor, towards the dream of an endlessly perfectable reality.
It’s not so very far from the dramatist’s own plight. Time travel essentially turns characters into playwrights of their own lives, capable of feeding themselves the perfect comeback line or crafting the perfect exit, only to find themselves locked tight in a self-constructed prison. The best such films — Back to the Future, Groundhog Day — are parables about the tyranny of perfectionism. They demonstrate to control freaks the importance of letting go.
I’m not sure Curtis is quite there yet: anyone that intent on arranging the tendrils of climbing rose that adorn his hero's parents' beach-front cottage evidently doesn't feel ready to renounce perfectionism and all its discontents.
Curtis remains a little too obsessed with his characters’ goodness of heart. In About Time, as courtship yields to marriage and marriage to babies, the movie drifts perilously close to that most dreaded and undramatic of subjects, the happily married couple. One is naturally pleased for Tim and Mary but around about the arrival of the third child, I began to wonder: where, pray, is the time travel? Curtis’s conceit appeared to have quietly made its excuses and left the building.
He brings it back to grapple with a couple of tragedies that befall the family, nudging the film past the two-hour mark and into a sluggish custard of voiceover impressing on us the importance of living each day as if it were our last, and how all life is time travel, etc etc. True or not, one resents the effort not made to dramatise these truths, rather than simply throwing them at us as we’re leaving, like a handful of fortune cookies.
Oh well. Next time.
Elsewhere on the Guardian
"About Time is a good-natured fantasy romance of such utterable daftness that it's impossible to dislike. Criticising it is like vivisecting a Labrador puppy."
"One curious aspect of Curtis's filmography is that while he's more or less synonymous with romantic comedy, he's profoundly uninterested in romantic relationships."
"You feel a true Scrooge balking at a movie message which urges you to make the most of every day, however humdrum it might appear. But there's something grating about being instructed to do so by a character whose "ordinary little life" is objectively pretty minted.
