“About Time:” How one charming movie gets time-travel (and love) right

[ WARNING: This contains minor plot details about the 2013 movie About Time.]

If your younger self had been able to plan out “your perfect life,” what would that look like?

Writer-director Richard Curtis, creator of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, was having this very philosophical conversation with his buddy when — according to Time Magazine — had an epiphany:

They realized, Curtis said, that their younger selves would have thought that gambling in Monte Carlo and dating a supermodel would have been the ultimate happiness, but that their current selves wanted a more everyday sort of happiness. “Actually, we were living about as happy lives as we could and we weren’t as happy as we should be,” he recalls. “I remember walking home that day and thinking how beautiful it is where I live. I’d never paid attention. I always thought, ‘Oh God, I’m late,’ or, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?’ I started that day taking this film seriously.”

I came across the film he created as a result of that conversation quite randomly.  The 2013 movie, called “About Time,” was promoted by this trailer:

The film begins on Tim’s (Domnhall Gleeson) twenty-first birthday, when his father (Bill Nighy) sits him down to tell him a shocking family secret: he men in his family have the ability to time travel.  The father cautions him not to use his gift for money or fame, as many who came before him had tried. Tim, lanky and awkward around women, promptly decides that he is going to use his gift to find love.

Time travel is a great romantic asset, it turns out.  If one method of flirting doesn’t quite work out, he just rewinds and starts anew.  If he gets cold feet and doesn’t seize the romantic moment like he should’ve he now has a chance to go back and make it right.  He meets and falls for a woman named Mary (Rachel McAdams) in one of the more clever “meet cutes” to date.

This is not your typical time-travel film.  “Time-travel movies usually have a clear end in sight, some situation that needs fixing. Marty McFly needs his parents to get together; John Connor needs to avoid Terminators long enough to grow up; the guys from Hot Tub Time Machine need to stop messing up the past and get back in their … hot tub time machine,” wrote an NPR movie reviewer.

But this story is both larger and smaller than its predecessors:

Curtis’ vision, in the end, ends up involving time perception rather than time travel. As Tim, the protagonist, says in the narration of the trailer, what really matters is to live every day fully, even if you have the ability to live them multiple times. “I was trying to make a movie about how to be happy, and I know the answer to how to be happy is not traveling through time,” Curtis explains. “It’s actually relishing our time.”

The movie’s profound affect on me caused me to “start acting weird,” according to my kids. I began telling them I loved them more, turning off the phone, and wanting to hang out more frequently. The trick to the movie is that viewers, while watching it, tend to have the same epiphany, that we’re also actually living our best lives right now.

This is what every woman with crying toddlers at the grocery store is told repeatedly by well-meaning ladies in line.  “Enjoy this time,” they always say.  “It doesn’t last long.”  Of course, it’s hard to really grasp this deep truth while you’re trying to figure out whether the cereal is on sale and how to keep your baby from climbing out of the cart.

This film, however, brings home this notion by tackling the temporary nature of life, the beauty of every day moments, and the joys of simple things.

When my seventeen year old daughter watched it with her friend, they called me and said, “We need to talk to you about this movie!  We’ll never be the same,” they said.  “We’re going to live more slowly, more deliberately, more appreciatively.”

Which is exactly how I’ve felt since viewing it as well. Back to the Future never did that.

This movie is rated R.  For advice on whether it’s right for your family, please visit PluggedInOnline.