Written by Erin Tatum.
Everyone loves a feel-good story about an awkward ginger falling in love and bonding with his family! About Time follows the life of Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), a young lawyer, whose father (Bill Nighy) informs him on his 21st birthday that he has the ability to time travel. Specifically, that all the men in his family have the ability to time travel. I was a little bit perplexed that the women are kept in the dark about the family secret, but I guess it’s a metaphor for paternal bonding or whatever. Tim immediately endeavors to use his newfound gift to find a girlfriend, which feels slightly immature for a guy who’s out of school and in a steady career. Nevertheless, Gleeson keeps the tone light and heartwarming. Tim soon meets Mary (Rachel McAdams) and makes frequent use of his time travel to ensure that every aspect of their relationship development is perfect.
What I like about Tim is that he’s flawed in a relatively benign way. While we’ve been conditioned as viewers to see the lead roles as starcrossed lovers, despite Tim’s undeniable love for Mary, he’s indiscriminate. He doesn’t really care who he falls in love with as long as he’s in love. As a testament to this, the film devotes a surprisingly large amount of time to showing his failed conquest of his first love, Charlotte (Margot Robbie). Far from the traditional notions of Hollywood romance, Mary arguably only becomes Tim’s true love because she was the first girl to give him a chance. Tim even goes on an ambiguous date with Charlotte while he’s dating Mary, wherein Charlotte predictably expresses playful remorse for initially rejecting him and makes a move. Tim carefully cuts it off just short of cheating – only by a hair’s breadth – to avoid venturing into unsympathetic protagonist territory. (He conveniently runs home to Mary and spontaneously proposes.) I will say that I’m not a fan of bringing Charlotte back into the narrative to encourage the audience to thumb their nose at her and feed into smug Nice Guy vindictiveness. However, I do like that Tim and Mary are just sort of together out of coincidence because it proves that you don’t always need an epic back story or a lot of angst to be happy with someone.
I have some concerns about female agency in this movie. Tim meets Mary several times with varying degrees of success. He redoes their initial conversation so much that he ironically lands a date with her by using her own opinions verbatim from previous attempts. He discovers through his lackluster interactions with Charlotte that even time travel and the clairvoyance that it brings can’t force someone to fall in love with him, but his experiences with Mary suggest otherwise. Sure, Mary was attracted to him from the start and you could conclude that any little tweaks Tim made wouldn’t have that much of an impact if they truly were “meant to be.” Obsessively manipulating every tiny aspect of your relationship to meet your idealized standards doesn’t exactly feel like you’re allowing the chemistry to develop organically. There’s definitely something uncomfortable about picking a random girl as your love object and then meticulously premeditating everything until she’s basically a blank slate for the perfect partner. That’s not really liberating for Mary. It’s the (500) Days of Summer mentality minus the petulant entitlement.
These problematic aspects are mostly redeemed in that the romance isn’t actually the heart of the story. Refreshingly enough, Tim’s relationships with his family quickly come back to the foreground to pack more of an affective punch than sappy a love story ever could on its own. I’ve never seen the main romance as a faux A-plot in a romcom-esque drama and I couldn’t have enjoyed that twist more. The bond between Tim and his father turns out to be the most emotional aspect of the film. At times, I found Tim’s dizzy sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) airy fairy to the point of being almost obnoxiously childlike, but Wilson and Gleeson have a phenomenal, easy chemistry that evens out her frayed edges. They’re one of my favorite brother/sister relationships in recent memory. Although Tim is clearly protective of her, it’s never overbearing or controlling. When Kit Kat turns to drinking to deal with her abusive boyfriend and gets into a car crash, Tim tries unsuccessfully to undo events before realizing that she needs to make the decision to better her life choices on her own. Somewhat implausibly, she has this epiphany in a few short sentences and finds new love and stability with Tim’s geeky best friend Jay (Will Merrick, bizarrely playing Gleeson’s peer despite a ten year age gap). I much prefer Tim and Kit Kat’s relationship as partners in crime to the romanticized possessiveness of brothers over sisters. I also think the fact that Tim was unable to protect her from all the bad things in life and gently encouraged her to make changes herself is much more realistic. People can get wrapped up in their lives and not notice what’s going on with their family, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they love them any less or should feel obligated to beat themselves up. They can still do the best they can as a support system. The only person I wish had been explored more is Tim’s mom. Oh well, I guess you can’t expect everyone to be totally developed. It’s just strange given that everyone else in his family seems so close.
A few unexpected plot twists keep things from becoming stale and work to set limits on the God complex of time travel. Tim takes Kit Kat back in time to stop her from meeting her abusive boyfriend after the car crash, which happened to occur on the day of his daughter’s first birthday. Things appear to go off without a hitch until to his horror, he returns home to a completely different child. His dad explains that he can’t go back in time past the birth of his child because it would effectively create a sperm roulette and produce different children every time, meaning that events are set in stone with the birth of each of his future children. This caveat acquires heart wrenching significance when his dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He and Tim continue to spend time together through time travel after his death, but it isn’t long before Mary announces she wants another baby. The meetings between father and son must come to a close. (Although I’m not quite sure how they happen. He can’t time travel because he’s dead. If Tim travels back, isn’t it just his memory of his dad? How does he continue to live? If he is “alive,” it’s a bit rude to leave your dad in purgatory.) Their final scene together is a massive tearjerker. Tim ultimately decides to stop time traveling altogether and live each day to the fullest. Even if you have the power to live every moment again, sometimes the present is perfect enough.