Curtis: About Time (2013)

As a veritable elder statesman of the British romantic comedy, Richard Curtis perhaps knows better than anybody that one of the most comforting things about the genre is its confidence in futurity. When a romantic comedy ends, and the couple get together, their future may not be ours – it may feel a long way from ours – but they still embody some assurance that the future, as a category, exists. Curtis’ latest film, About Time, complicates this somewhat – like most of his efforts, it’s about a bumbling introvert who wishes he had a second chance at nearly every romantic conversation or encounter. The difference here is that he does – on his twenty-first birthday, Tim (Domhall Gleason, channelling Hugh Grant) finds out from his father (Bill Nighy) that all the men in his family have the ability to time travel. As a result, Tim manages to seal the deal with his love interest Mary (Rachel McAdams) fairly quickly – he’s awkward and provincial, she’s beautiful and urbane, but by halfway through they’re married with children. In other words, the future promised by countless romantic comedies arrives – or seems to arrive. In order to preserve that future, however, Tim finds himself compelled to make more and more trips into the past, even as the past contracts, since one of the stipulations of this family brand of time travel is that it’s unwise to go back beyond the most recent birth, death or marriage. As Tim tries to preserve the future from an ever-shrinking past, he realises that it’s perhaps best to treat the future as the past, finally jettisoning time travel altogether to greet every morning as if he’s travelled back to it for a second time. And, in the process, the tender precarity that opens most romantic comedies, and the sense of déjà vu that accompanies most romantic meetings, lasts beyond the end, even or especially as Tim and Mary’s relationship seems ever more secure, tedious and banal. That makes for quite an unusual and disorienting experience, and if there’s any weakness, it’s that Curtis’ direction isn’t quite up to his screenwriting. Yet that also feels appropriate – if the role of the director is to prove that the future of the screenplay is somehow unwritten, then Curtis refuses to do that here: the future is written, has already been written, meaning that the film can sometimes feel both spontaneous and overdetermined, elusive and heavy-handed, but in combinations and constellations that are all its own.