About Time

Movie, 2013, R

Premise - For one particularly special family, the entire male line has the ability to travel back in time through one's life. When Tim learns of this gift on his 21st birthday, he knew he was always going to use it to help him find love. Follow the story of this endearing time traveler's life from his early 20s on through adulthood as he struggles to reconcile what he can and cannot change.

Review - If I were to summarize this movie in a single word, I would have no trouble choosing the word "precious." The movie was unfortunately advertised as a pure romance film, or perhaps a romantic comedy. In truth, the film is about love in all forms - romance, friendship, and at its core, family. This is a film about how far we will go to get it right, so that we can keep the people we love close and out of harm's way.

This is also a film about life and what it means to appreciate it. To come back to the word precious, people are precious, experiences are precious, and life is precious, most especially because nothing can last forever, even when time travel is thrown into the mix. It is in fact this very fact, that time is ephemeral, that makes it so precious.

I swear I'll stop using the word in a moment, but one last part of the movie that's just straight precious is Tim himself. What an adorkable lead. A British nerdy muffin played by Domnhall Gleeson. He's somewhat annoying in his obliviousness and ignorance of the ways in which his time travel can have negative consequences. Also, he has a horrible habit of misspeaking so terribly, that you wonder even amongst the socially awkward, "How is that possible??" But he's a good tool for the audience to show what the limits of time travel are, and what kinds of experiences are worth retrying and which ones are a lost cause. So sweet, and a hopeless romantic, he is able to find the love of his life (with a little help from time travel, but to be fair, he wouldn't have needed the time travel if he didn't use time travel in the first place). This sort of puts some blurred lines on the "stalking for love" trope, because he definitely uses things he knew about Mary to his advantage in winning her over. But, to be fair, these were things Mary herself told him in an alternate universe, so... morally we're in the clear.

I swear this movie is one of my favorites. I have seen it several times and it always just hurts my feels. You see Tim (and Mary) grow up through such emotionally life-changing parts of life, from falling in love, to marriage, to children... all precious things that he would never, EVER want to put at risk for the selfish sake of time travel.

There is also a wish fulfillment piece to why I love this film. It is impossible to describe how much I would want to have Tim's gift. Not for the purpose of changing life's mistakes! Actually that's the last thing I'd focus on. I'd just want to be like Tim's father. He's used time travel to keep a certain kind of immortality. He has read every book there is to read, twice, and Dickens three times, as he specifically points out. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I'D WANT THIS??? You'd never feel guilty about wasting a day, EVER! You could live a week of laziness, just reading and re-reading, and then start the week over productively and there would be no consequences. If I could make a wish with a genie, this would be it. I can even imagine myself traveling through time just to rewatch this film over and over again without guilt. (98/100)

Quote - "I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day to enjoy it as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life."

What to watch for - I think I was familiar with just about every cast member in this! I just love me some British stuff. Will Merrick (Alo from "Skins") plays the best friend and I think this is the only feature film he's been in, so that's precious! The one actress I wasn't familiar with was the one who played Kit Kat, but she is an adorable character to look out for.

If you liked this movie, I recommend Groundhog Day!

Directed by Richard Curtis
Distributed by Working Title