About Time

Film (2013)

With Domhnall Gleeson (Tim), Rachel McAdams (Mary), Bill Nighy (Dad), Lydia Wilson (Kit Kat), Lindsay Duncan (Mum), Richard Cordery (Uncle D), Joshua McGuire (Rory), Tom Hollander (Harry), Margot Robbie (Charlotte), Will Merrick (Jay), Vanessa Kirby (Joanna), Tom Hughes (Jimmy Kincade)

Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) emerges into adulthood with some metaphysical guidance from his Dad (Bill Nighy) which enables him to do the right thing most of the time.

This sweet, light film has a lot in common with the darker, funnier and more acerbic Harold Ramis classic Groundhog Day (1993), which is also about manipulations of time and the ways that helps its sometimes hapless protagonists to learn about life. Both have something to do with the option to revisit missed opportunities and to accumulate, through that deft wizardry, the capacity to live wisely, and ultimately, without temporal shenanigans.

Richard Curtis, who also wrote and directed Love, Actually (2003), and wrote Notting Hill (1999) and Three Weddings and a Funeral (1993), has a penchant for producing charmingly appealing romantic comedies that are believable enough to make them digestible while not introducing anything challenging enough to make them significantly more than sweet delights.

About Time, like the others, has a quaint appeal that goes a long way towards relieving a grim evening without raising the catharsis level over a soft purr. Its peculiar charm is in its use of a science fiction-like premise to serve a more straightforward human end, and it disembarks from its wizardry in a way that makes for a compelling denouement.

The legalistic complexities of the temporal chicanery are great enough that halfway through the film one begins to want to consult Dumbledore about these intricacies. Like all time travel plots this one makes existential hay about the implications of modifying the actual past; unlike others, its constraints are more oddly particular. Somehow, in the end, it works okay, and we get out of the theatre in reasonable shape, even without Dumbledore’s assistance.

Domnhall Gleeson (Tim), who I have seen as Levin in the unfortunate remake of Anna Karenina (2012) and as a member of a family implicated with the Irish Republican Army in Shadow Dancer (2013), has, in contrast to those rather dour portrayals, a chance to live it up here. His Tim is a vulnerably appealing, not quite cool enough to be dashing, hero, whose capacity to hover between geekiness and self-possession is perfect for the role. He is quite good in the part Hugh Grant used to play in Curtis films, slightly bumbling but all the more attractive for it. Gleeson, to boot, is less conventionally handsome than Grant, which makes the appeal go further.

As his romantic counterpart, Rachel McAdams (Mary), is just as conventionally attractive as Gleeson’s Tim is not. Curtis tries to dress her down a bit and give her a schoolmarmish quality, but McAdams has such a radiant screen presence that the effort, though noted, is barely effective. Nonetheless, that combination of Mary’s gleam and Tim’s glimmer only adds spice to the mix.

Bill Nighy (Dad), who made a great, aging rock star in Love, Actually makes a great father here. Everyone should have a father like this, as Curtis shows us, and all fathers should have the magical capacities for both enabling their children to revisit their lives until they achieve insight and the caring to see them through to the end – all without being patronizing. Nighy somehow conveys saltiness and sentimental warmth in the right proportions to make the chemistry work.

This pleasant film, like all good fables, goes down easily and teaches us a lesson along the way at the cost of not entirely unexpected, relatively acceptable, turns of fate.

– BADMan