About Time

About Time has an interesting premise. What would you do if you could travel through time, but only to change things about your own life: making different choices, fixing mistakes, or getting a second shot at an opportunity you squandered? I really liked About Time. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was, however, not the movie I was expecting.

The movie is ostensibly a romantic comedy, that’s certainly how it was marketed, but in reality it sort of is and it sort of isn’t. Writer/director Richard Curtis is most known for his straight romantic comedies, like Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but About Time reminded me more of one of his later works: Love, Actually. Love, Actually is thought of as a romantic comedy, but in reality it is a movie about love, the concept, from a huge variety of viewpoints and so while some stories are traditionally romantic, others deal with simple puppy love, familial love, unrequited love, waning love, and so on. About Time similarly is about love and romance, but it is also about how that touches on bigger subjects like family, loss, and the meaning of life.

The first half of the movie plays like a familiar romantic comedy with a supernatural twist. The real twist isn’t the supernatural element, however, it is that the traditional romance story resolves itself fairly tidily in the first half of the film, allowing the rest of the film to go somewhere completely different. This second half suddenly expands into an exploration of what the protagonist’s supernatural powers mean and what they can teach us about life. Suddenly sisters with abusive boyfriends and aged fathers with serious illnesses become the focus of the story. We get to see how the protagonist faces these as part of a partnership, to be fair, but it isn’t really a romantic comedy anymore at all.

I didn’t mind this shift. It is done in a very natural way and so the two halves feel a part of the same, cohesive whole. I liked the exploration of more philosophical concepts. Some might find the ending and it’s thoughts on living to be a bit trite, but it didn’t really bother me. The message fit with the themes of the movie even if it’s a cliche.

The time travel is also very well handled. This is a pet peeve of mine, but I usually hate time travel stories that have weak internal logic. Occasionally a movie can handle time travel in a silly way, like in Back to the Future or Time Bandits, and I won’t mind the terrible paradoxes.  For all other stories, however, time travel needs to have airtight logic or I’m not going to be happy. Luckily, About Time sets a very consistent and understandable set of rules as to how time travel functions and, with one fairly minor and largely ignorable exception, never deviates from it. The exposition on how travel works is never clunky, the results of travel always make sense, and when new rules are introduced they always feel compatible with the rules of time travel as they’ve been explained so far.

This fantasy romantic comedy family drama is trying to be a lot of different things and, generally speaking, it succeeds. This necessitates a major tonal shift from the first to the second act, but I believe About Time handles it well. However, if you are looking for a more straightforward and traditional romantic comedy, like some of Richard Curtis’ earlier works, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

Would Recommend: If complex romance stories that go beyond the happily-ever-after, into what happens next, are your jam.

Would Not Recommend: If you loathe cliches about what it means to live life to its fullest.