About Time (2013)

Ads hastened to point out that writer-director Richard Curtis wrote Love Actually, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. If you think that necessitates a role for Hugh Grant, you're wrong. Instead, we get a couple of Harry Potter alumni.

At 21, the aptly named Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) learns a secret from his father (Bill Nighy): Thanks to an apparent Y-chromosome mutation, he and other male relatives can return to any point in their personal pasts, take a different route, and then snap back to the present. After Tim confirms that he can do it himself, he decides to use it to improve...his love life. And undo mistakes in other matters while he's at it.

You may think it's a rather selfish use of time travel. Of course, the other men in his family aren't exactly heroes themselves; Dad mostly just catches up on reading. To be fair, it's a rather limited power. I don't think a typical man could have prevented, say, the 9/11 attacks with it. And the bigger and further back the changes Tim makes, the less recognizable the present becomes. Besides, I know I'd hate to go rectifying lots of strangers' pasts, or I'd never know when to stop.

Tim still annoyed me a bit, whether by wanting Charlotte (Margot Robbie) for little more than her beauty or, when clearly crushing on Mary (Rachel McAdams) for other reasons, by essentially stalking her. It's not cool to learn her interests and then pretend to have them. He also can be slow on the uptake, not realizing what other people wouldn't know yet. Tim becomes a little more likable as the story goes on, if only because we watch him struggle in spite of his unfair advantage.

Perhaps most annoying to me is the lack of this power among the women in the family. After all that practice in the genre, does Curtis lack the confidence to delve into the female mind? Charlotte seems fickle, like she doesn't even know herself, and Mary feels ordinary compared to the many eccentric/extreme males around. Only Tim's wild sister Katherine (Lydia Wilson) is a worthy piece of work, and she doesn't get as much screen time as I'd like. Eh, maybe there ironically just isn't enough time in one reasonable-length movie to explore much more than we get.

Apart from disparities in gender treatment, the story's not bad. Certainly the basic premise of getting to retry from seconds to years ago will always intoxicate humanity. It's not a guarantee of eventual success at everything, so there's still a set of conflicts to work through. Sometimes Tim can't time-travel when he wants, either because he doesn't want to interfere with a major good event or because someone is preventing him from using the mechanism. He needs a dark space like a closet, you see. That leads to some real social awkwardness, tho oddly enough, I think nobody ever sees him get into or out of those spaces.

Funny? Now and then, probably more for temporal antics than for people being asses. We do get quite a few of the latter, not least in the form of rude, bitter Harry (Tom Hollander). But matters grow more serious than you might think, and the eventual mood is rather uplifting.

I'm sure many of you would get a real kick out of this movie. For my part, I'd like to see a more feminine or unisex variant, kinda like a more mature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.