![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2013\/10\/abouttime2.jpg\" "\\"abouttime2\\"")
<\/a>Poor Rachel McAdams. She just can\u2019t get a man to stay with her in the moment.<\/p>\nFour years ago she was The Time Traveler\u2019s Wife<\/i>, living her life in a single linear direction while her husband lurched forwards and backwards within their relationship.<\/p>\n
Now, in About Time<\/i>, she\u2019s married to a guy who keeps jumping back in time and making changes to her life: preventing her from meeting the man who became her boyfriend on an earlier timeline, tricking her into thinking that their second or third (and increasingly awesome) time in the sack was actually their first, fine-tuning his marriage proposal until he gets precisely the answer he wants, and so on.<\/p>\n
At least this time she\u2019s in a romantic comedy written and directed by Richard Curtis, who is nothing if not a crowd-pleaser. As the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral<\/i> and Notting Hill<\/i>, the writer-director of Love Actually<\/i>, and a scribe on countless British TV shows, he knows a thing or two about keeping the audience entertained.<\/p>\n
So entertained, in fact, that in the case of About Time<\/i>, you can almost forget the awful morality of the film\u2019s main protagonist.<\/p>\n
The film revolves around a man named Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendan; he played one of the Weasley boys in the last two Harry Potter<\/a><\/i> films), who at the age of 21 is told by his father (the always watchable Bill Nighy, whose cadences here got me thinking that he might be the British Christopher Walken) that the men in their family have a secret: they can travel through time, simply by going into a dark place, closing their fists, and thinking of where \u2014 or, rather, when \u2014 they\u2019d like to go.<\/p>\n The mechanics of all this are not explained very well, nor are they portrayed consistently within the film.<\/p>\n For example, when you go back in time, do you arrive in the dark place where you began the trip (thereby making the original you vanish from wherever you were, which might come as a shock to any bystanders)? Or do you simply transfer your later consciousness to the body that you had at the time, wherever it happened to be, like the protagonist in The Butterfly Effect<\/i>? Both things happen in this film, if memory serves, and there seems to be no reason for the inconsistency beyond the filmmakers doing whatever they felt was \u201cright\u201d dramatically in any given scene.<\/p>\n Also, Tim\u2019s dad says Tim can\u2019t go into the future, meaning the part of Tim\u2019s life that Tim has not lived through yet, but apparently Tim can<\/i> come back to the present after going to the past \u2014 even when the present is radically different because of Tim\u2019s actions in the past. So that\u2019s still sort of like traveling to the future, yes? I mean, he\u2019s basically created a new timeline and jumped into the future of that timeline, right?<\/p>\n And if Tim is<\/i> jumping from the past to the radically altered present, how does he live his new life on the timeline between those two points? He doesn\u2019t appear to have lived it on autopilot, like Adam Sandler did when he fast-forwarded through his life in Click<\/i>, but he doesn\u2019t remember having any of the new experiences \u2014 or making any of the new choices \u2014 that he had or made on the new timeline, either.<\/p>\n Later in the film, we learn that Tim can take people back in time with him, too \u2014 and that he can restore the past after he\u2019s made some unintentionally drastic changes to it. So why doesn\u2019t he do either of these things more often?<\/p>\n And so on, and so on.<\/p>\n You might think that having a power like time-travel would have massive, even global, repercussions \u2014 but Curtis keeps things fairly small-scale. He establishes right off the bat that Tim\u2019s family is fairly well-off, thanks to one of Tim\u2019s ancestors, and that they keep to themselves pretty much, though they do have friends \u2019round for visits.<\/p>\n So instead of finding himself caught up in a worldwide conspiracy, like the protagonist who could teleport himself all over the globe in Jumper<\/a><\/i>, Tim is free to focus on what any slightly awkward guy in his early 20s would focus on: getting a girlfriend.<\/p>\n It\u2019s certainly amusing to see Tim use his power, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day<\/i>, to learn what sort of pick-up lines would work on a girl, and then go back in time and use them on her before she\u2019s had a chance to get to know him. But the stakes aren\u2019t particularly high in the early scenes. It\u2019s when Tim meets Mary (McAdams) and things start to get serious that they also become somewhat morally disquieting.<\/p>\n And in fact, I actually had qualms with this aspect of the film from fairly early on in Tim and Mary\u2019s relationship.<\/p>\n The fact that Tim steals Mary away from a party just before her future-boyfriend shows up can sort of be justified on the basis that Mary didn\u2019t meet that boyfriend on the original timeline anyway. Tim originally met Mary when she was still available, and it was only after he went back in time to help one of his friends that Mary met the other guy, so you could always argue that Tim is just restoring things to the way they were.<\/p>\n But then what? The first time Tim and Mary have sex, it\u2019s awkward and not very satisfying \u2014 as it is indeed for most<\/i> people the first time they have sex \u2014 and Mary is actually very understanding about it. But that\u2019s not good enough for Tim, so he goes back in time and has sex with Mary for the \u201cfirst\u201d time all over again.<\/p>\n Tim gets the benefit of memory and experience with Mary, but Mary does not share equally in the relationship in that regard. She does not share Tim\u2019s memories of mutual discovery. And you can\u2019t help thinking that, from that point on, every time Mary turns one of their conversations back to this key moment in their lives, Tim will have to clam up or admit that he\u2019s been lying to her this whole time.<\/p>\n The fact that Tim is exploiting Mary\u2019s lack of memory regarding the early stages of their relationship is made all the more striking by the fact that, just last year in The Vow<\/i>, McAdams played a woman who loses her memory in a car accident \u2014 thus requiring her husband to woo her all over again. For the husband of that film, the fact that she could not remember key moments from their life together was a deep wound that needed to be healed, not something that worked in the husband\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n But the key scene for me \u2014 the scene where I really came to dislike Tim, at least for the next few scenes \u2014 comes after Tim and Mary have been living together for a while, and Tim goes out one evening and bumps into a girl that he had flirted with once.<\/p>\n Will Tim cheat on Mary? The possibility is presented to him, and, since he knows that he literally has more than one chance to accept the offer \u2014 simply by going back and reliving the evening \u2014 he abruptly leaves the girl hanging and dashes back home to propose to Mary. The implication seems to be that, if Mary says yes, then fine, Tim will stick with what he\u2019s got, but if Mary says no, then, well, who\u2019s to say how Tim might try to relive that evening (or the days leading up to that evening)?<\/p>\n I suppose we should be grateful that Tim\u2019s first response isn\u2019t to go through with the de facto<\/i> adultery and then<\/i> go back in time and prevent it from ever happening. But still, just the fact that he seems to be entertaining the idea and keeping it in his back pocket, as it were, undermines the scene for me. What does Tim plan to do if Mary says no to his proposal? Erase their relationship entirely? Leave her<\/i> hanging?<\/p>\n The whole point of living a life connected to other people<\/i> is that we are not the centres of our worlds. Other people \u2014 their lives and experiences \u2014 matter too. And this is a point that Tim seems utterly oblivious to for far too long.<\/p>\n So, I had some problems with the first half of the film. But then, after Tim and Mary get married and start having kids, things begin to get interesting, as Tim\u2019s focus begins to shift back towards the family that he was born into.<\/p>\n