Richard Curtis movies are movies about love. Most of them are about conventional romantic love, but the occasional love letter like The Boat That Rocked or Yesterday will slip in there. Even War Horse, not often thought of as a Richard Curtis film due to being directed by Steven Spielberg (who can’t help but overshadow most other creatives on the films he directs), is a boy and his pet love story. He’s clearly very compelled by the idea of love, its importance, its many varieties, and what it means, enough so to make a movie encompassing a wide variety of loves with Love Actually. But even this wasn’t quite comprehensive enough, dealing with love strictly pertaining to human relationships (and of course it unfortunately leaves out any non-heterosexual, non-cisgender relationships, thus coming up short of what it strives to be). There came a point though when Curtis wanted to explore love in the abstract as a companion to living a meaningful life …and perhaps when he wanted to lightly dip his toe into science-fiction.
According to Curtis, the idea for About Time came out of him realizing he didn’t feel truly happy in life and thinking about how he could live each day in order to find that happiness. Because he’s Richard Curtis this naturally expanded to becoming a romance, but the time travel element was a little more novel. Curtis had written time travel exactly twice before: for Blackadder: Back & Forth in 1999, where it was a joke (a very very good one), and for the great Doctor Who episode “Vincent and the Doctor” in 2010, where it played a minimal role. In both cases he was working within a preordained aesthetic; The Time Machine (and a bit of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) for the former, and the decades of established (and often contradictory) Doctor Who continuity on time travel for the latter. His own time travel would be extremely subdued, inordinately simple, and more magical realist in approach than science-fiction, much like Midnight in Paris.
The hereditary ability possessed by male members of the Lake family doesn’t bestow on them a grand ethical responsibility -they can only travel backwards and into their own lives, with the power only to influence themselves and their choices -a kind of modest time travel many of us would probably like to be capable of. Because as we see, it allows Domhnall Gleeson’s Tim to circumvent awkward moments and mould his life relatively to his own whim. There’s a level of dishonesty in this, and the films’ clearest problematic component comes from how he, as the architect of his own love life, arranges for the woman he’s in love with to be with him -arguably stripping her of some degree of free will. It’s not a completely unethical manipulation, as Tim does initially meet Mary free of any time travel orchestrations and there’s a genuine spark between them. Their first encounter at a Dans le Noir restaurant, entirely in darkness is really lovely and novel, and afterwards once Mary has revealed herself to be a beautiful Rachel McAdams (a curious third time that Curtis has paired a lonely British man with an American woman) and says that she hopes to see Tim again, you understand why he wouldn’t want to lose a relationship with her. But his actions turn quite dubious once he accidentally erases that meeting only to find she’s met a different guy, and undertakes some creepy shenanigans to selfishly get her back, such as waiting for her at a Kate Moss exhibition and then tracking her down at a party before she can meet the rival. It robs Mary of some agency in her own choices, and the fact he never tells her this strictly kept secret one might see as a form of gaslighting. This might shadow and dampen the whole film if it didn’t subsequently do such a good job proving they’re meant to be together.
Because Gleeson and McAdams have fantastic chemistry, really coming across like a genuine if idealized loving couple. It’s a testament to their performances that you don’t question why there isn’t more tension in their relationship, you’re too busy being charmed by how sweet they are together, how cute their little quirks and rapports are. Once again it is entirely from the male perspective, but credit where it’s due, McAdams really stands out and enriches an otherwise thin character. And unlike in Four Weddings and Notting Hill, Tim and Mary are never separated by circumstance once they’ve gotten together, and so we get to follow their relationship. We see them hit it off, we see them dating, we see them living together, we see him meet her parents and her meet his, and we see him propose after a final, seemingly cosmic test of his love for her involving a pre-breakthrough Margot Robbie . We see them get married …and then remarkably, the film keeps going, and we realize only then that About Time is not about the romance.
This maybe should have been apparent to us. About Time is not the first Curtis movie to use voiceover narration, but it does employ that voiceover in a different way -one distinctly from the future tense. And he begins the story not by alluding to Tims’ love life, but introducing his close-knit and beloved family in Cornwall. They’re an instantly strange bunch, with traditions of routine table tennis games and watching movies projected onto the side of their house, conventional if slightly snobbish eccentricities of the relatively upper class. But they’re nice and quaint in spite of this. They disappear for a portion of the movie, when the primary concern is Tim’s time travel antics to meet Mary, turning up more prominently once that relationship hits its permanent phase and especially after the marriage. It’s there that Tim’s father James, played with extraordinary heart by Bill Nighy, exercises his own time travel power to deliver an emotional speech during the reception. Suddenly we begin to connect to these characters who had been merely supporting players before, not unlike the gangs of friends that backed up Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and Notting Hill. Now, they become larger figures in Tim and Marys’ lives as gracefully, the film transitions its focus to family. By about the halfway point, Tim has achieved what he set out to with his power, to find love; but his emotional journey isn’t over, and Curtis, who has so romanticized falling in love in his other movies, is making us aware the key to a happy life doesn’t just rest in a partner.
Tim makes a shocking discovery when he tries to go back in time to avert an accident in which his sister Kit-Kat (a delightful ball of eccentric energy played by Lydia Wilson) is injured in a car crash that may or may not have been attempted suicide, by preventing her from meeting her abusive boyfriend in the first place. When he returns to find his daughter has been replaced by a son, he learns that he can never travel to a point before his child was born due to it upsetting the biological exactitude of the reproductive process. Curtis through James explains it in a way that makes a kind of sense, necessary plot contrivance though it may be. In fact, the time travel mechanics overall are among the shoddiest I’ve seen in a movie, but it doesn’t matter -because the time travel isn’t what’s important, being merely a device to service Curtis’ principal themes (although taking Kit-Kat back seemed like an exceptionally pointless reason to break a rule, existing only so she can punch the asshole in the face). In this instance it’s the harsh acknowledgement that some things are out of our control. Tim’s reaction to finding a different baby in his present could easily have been treated as a joke, like some of the earlier repercussions of his time travelling that would need to be fixed –but it isn’t. Tim has no choice but to retcon the incident and allow Kit-Kat’s crash. And somehow it’s tragic that he must resign himself to the powerlessness to change the past that we all have -especially once things get more dire.
There’s not a lot I can find on the relationship between Curtis and his father. Curtis has always been quite private about his family life, so I’m not even sure if or when his father passed away. But I do know that while Tim is by far the closest to his author of any of Curtis’ avatars (even looking a bit like the young writer), he identifies with James just as much. It may be entirely speculation and auteurist presumption to believe Curtis was working through his own feelings about his fathers’ death, but whatever the root, the emotion surrounding Tim and James, their shared secret, and his reveal of a terminal cancer diagnosis cuts deep. I can’t help but feel a sense of regret permeating these tender moments, particularly the ones after he dies when Tim is still able to go back in time and tell him what his funeral was like. Once again, it feels like Curtis is enacting a fantasy –haven’t we all wished at the funeral of a loved one to be able to say some meaningful parting words to them? But it’s when Tim finally lets his father go with the conception of another child (the true reason for that added rule), that the movie is most coated in grief; yet it’s bittersweet, tinged on the margins with honest joy. That final bit of time travelling they do together is so full of equal parts love and sorrow that it damn near had me bawling.
This sequence encapsulates what Curtis is going for in terms of the films’ final statement, but he lets us know opaquely too. Always unafraid of directly saying what he means, Curtis spells out his philosophy through James’ final secret to Tim, an optimistic perception literalized and no doubt the root from which the whole film sprung. James instructs Tim to live every day twice, to both experience the necessary difficulties, the everyday tedium of life, and to see and appreciate the world for all its little wonders and joys. It’s no doubt the reason James always seemed so lively and contented, and eventually in a concession to audience practicality, Tim does away with the time travel altogether, merely living each day as though it were the second. It’s a really simple stop-and-smell-the-roses, don’t-take-things-for-granted kind of mantra; but perhaps it’s the sincerity of it, the endearing context it’s presented in, or the relentless optimism in the face of a demonstrated understanding that life and love can be painful that goes along with it that makes it enormously meaningful –perhaps even helpful for those of us like Curtis, in search of that elusive happiness.
About Time is Richard Curtis’ most melancholy movie. It’s less concerned with comedy than just about any of his other films, though still sharply funny in moments, as in the pessimistic grievances of Tom Hollander’s playwright family friend and an amusing Withnail and I reunion of Richard E. Grant and Richard Griffiths (his last movie role, bless him) as his actors. However it may also be Curtis’ most spirited, his most saccharinely idealistic and hopeful movie. But not once does it ever ring false in this, or feel naïve. It goes back to his comments from that BAFTA conversation, the year that About Time came out: “I think stories about joy and love are definitely worth telling.” His career as a screenwriter and director has been characterized by films that earnestly dare to be hopeful, that celebrate love and aim to find joy in the human experience. And it’s about time that stopped being a bad thing.
I’ve been a fan of Richard Curtis for years and I really enjoyed looking at his movies this month. I may not be done with him yet (there’s a holiday not too far off after all), but the experience of critiquing and learning to properly appreciate these films has been as enlightening for me as I hope my sharing those thoughts has been for you. In conclusion, I recommend watching About Time –which didn’t get near the attention and appraisal it deserved (also Nick Laird-Clowes’ score is beautiful!), checking out Yesterday, which isn’t great but has that Curtis charm, supporting Comic Relief (which has now done awkward reunion specials for TWO of Curtis’ films), and joining me next September for the obvious follow-up: Ben Elton Month.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment