About Time - film review

Richard Curtis goes back in time in a bid to reprise his greatest hits
Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson in About Time
5 November 2013

Soppy though it was, The Time Traveller’s Wife had some hard edges — radical age differences, for example, not to mention bits falling off the poor chap. About Time, Richard Curtis’s third film as writer-director, is The Time Traveller’s Wife-lite, time travelling fuelled by honey.

Gawky but immensely likeable Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Weasley in Harry Potter, so skilfully channelling Hugh Grant that you initially wonder if the part’s been dubbed) is told when he is 21 by his dad (lanky and immensely likeable Bill Nighy) that the men in his family have the ability to go back in time and re-write the past, up to a point, simply by going into a dark cupboard, clenching their fists and concentrating hard. They can’t travel into the future and they can’t assassinate Hitler but they can make minor life adjustments and get some second or third chances.

Tim’s dad has been making time to re-read Dickens. “For me it was always going to be about love,” Tim informs us from the off. We might have guessed. His first meeting with lovely American Mary (Rachel McAdams, super-cute) in the dark in the Clerkenwell restaurant Dans Le Noir goes marvellously without intervention — but then, after selflessly changing his evening to save the career of his embittered playwright landlord (Tom Hollander), he discovers their encounter never happened and he must try to find her all over again.

When he does, he uses time-travel to repeat their first awkward love-making over and over again until he has got it right. Mission accomplished.

From this point on, About Time dives headlong into sentimentality. Tim goes back to spend quality time with his adorable dad, playing ping-pong and walking on the beach right next to their dreamy Cornish mansion. He saves his wedding from terrible best-man speeches. He lovingly looks after his dippy, drunk sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson). “I try to live every day as if it were the final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life,” he tells us.

About Time could have been almost exactly the same film without time-travel — it’s just a screenwriter’s gimmick for a few reprises. The only really supernatural feat here is the way Richard Curtis has skipped over the great flop that was The Boat That Rocked of 2009 and recreated the mood of his earlier hits, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003). If you liked them, you won’t fail to like About Time. You might feel you’ve seen it all before but you can always play spot the difference.

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