About Time

So, cards on the table; I am a sap for Richard Curtis's particular brand of minimal social commentary, middle-class romantic comedies, even while I do recognise their failings. About Time is also a very soft SF film about time travel; like The Butterfly Effect without the butterfly effect.

As ever, this will not be a spoiler free review.

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson as Hugh Grant as Richard Curtis) is a charmingly awkward youth who lives in a Cornish idyll with his eccentric father (Bill Nighy), stubbornly practical mother (Lindsay Duncan), mental-but-gentle sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) and sweetly dim uncle (Richard Corderay). In his 21st year, his father tells him that the men in his family can travel within their own lifetime to revisit any point in their past and change their own actions.

Moving on, he gets his heart broken and learns that sometimes there is no right moment, just the wrong girl, and moves to London to practise law. Here he meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), the woman of his dreams, but loses her when a well-meaning piece of time travel helps out a friend, but leads to him erasing their meeting. We then follow his attempts to find her, their budding relationship, and very occasionally see Tim use his powers to improve his life.

This is a Richard Curtis movie, so overall it is light, fluffy and very sweet, with occasional darker moments which are all about humanity, rather than society. It has a fair amount in common with Four Weddings and a Funeral, but uses time travel instead of social format for its repetitions and has Rachel McAdams instead of Andie McDowell, which may qualify as the most pleasing replacement of one American actress with a celtic patronymic surname for another in the history of cinema. It is also, on occasions, deeply affecting, as when Tim is forced to choose between the future and the past, or his sister's happiness and the very existence of his first child.

And, as noted, it does have some problems - I would love to see someone produce a companion piece with a family in which the women can travel into the future, and once more London is depicted as very, very white - but as I often find with Richard Curtis movies, I find it hard to care that much. It also avoids some obvious traps: Tim never uses time travel to cheat Mary, their connection is immediate in the first instance; he also, given an opportunity, does not cheat on her and then 'undo' it, which I was worried might happen at one point. The film also never uses the conceit to allow Tim to wallow in revenge fantasies or do anything mean-spirited which only he will then recall.

About Time: It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's a lovely little film which it really is hard to dislike.

And now I'm pondering writing that story about women who can travel into the future.