A sweet and oddly melancholy movie from Richard Curtis (director of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, Notting Hill, etc) About Time is the story of Tim (Domnhall Gleason) an ordinary, run of the mill kind of guy- with a great family and a great life who grows up pretty normally until, at the age of 21, his father (Bill Nighy) reveals a family secret: the men in his family have the ability to travel in time.
Initially disbelieving at first, Tim travels back in time to a recent New Year's Eve where he had been too shy to kiss someone and rectifies that mistake- while his father says he uses the ability mainly to read as many books as he wants, Tim wants to use the ability to get girls- and when his sister has a friend, Charlotte come to stay for the summer, he does his best to do so- before, on one of Charlotte's last nights staying with them, she tells him that he's left it too late and should have said something sooner. When he tries to go back in time to change that- he comes to the realization that Charlotte isn't attracted to him and no amount of time travel can change that.
Tim leaves home shortly after that to move to London to study law- he stays with a friend of his father, Harry, a struggling playwright. Some months later, when one of his friends come to stay for the weekend, the two of them go out for dinner at a Dans Le Noir establishment (which are actually for real things- it'd be interesting to go eat at one of them) and get paired up with a random pair of women. Tim hits it off with one of them, Mary (Rachel McAdams) and when everyone emerges from the restaurant after dinner, Tim falls in love. He gets her number but returns home and finds that the debut of Harry's play has been a disaster- and he uses his time travel abilities to fix it- but an unusual problem results.
By fixing Harry's play, Tim loses Mary's number and has to embark on a series of complicated, time-traveling assisted hijinks, but eventually the two of them wind up together, in love and married and eventually have a kid. Tim learns some limits to his ability when he tries to spare his sister the pain of breaking up with her idiot, no-good boyfriend by making it so they never met- only to discover that he now has an entirely different child. He learns that he can't change anything before his child's birth without every aspect of his life being different- but can go back in time and restore the original timeline and let his sister suffer through a bad break-up to get things back to normal.
Then Tim learns that his father has terminal cancer and had known for awhile, time traveling to effectively spend as much time with his family as possible- but is now ready to die. He does so and Tim keeps traveling back in time to see him until Mary decides that she wants another child- which would mean that Tim wouldn't be able to see his father after the child is born. He agonizes over the choice but eventually decides that it is the right one and keeps visiting his Dad via time travel right up until the birth, receiving one last piece of advice from his Dad: to live every day- once with all the stresses and worries that everyone deals with and the second time, knowing exactly to expect from the day to embrace it for what it is. Eventually Tim realizes that savoring each and every moment with the people he loves is the best way to live his life and stops time traveling all together.
Overall: I have somewhat conflicting emotions about this movie- it's sweet and melancholy, but there's a touch of creepiness about it as well- especially when Tim rearranges time to make sure he runs into Mary again so they can fall in love- there's something vaguely possessive and stalker-ish about that that rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. But even if you ignore that part, there's something conflicted about this movie: should we be melancholy about the too-quick passage of time and how fleeting life is? Or should we savor the moments of sweetness and romance that life offers us? Or should we do both? Don't get me wrong: it was a good movie- but I feel like Richard Curtis could have done better- though with movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually to try and top, maybe that was too much to ask. *** out of ****.
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