It's About Time to Rewatch 'About Time'
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No one loves love quite like Richard Curtis. He is the bard of Bridget Jones, the Scorsese of selling a certain kind of wry romantic fantasy in films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and (naturally) Love Actually. Hugh Grant, droll and stammering, is his floppy-haired demigod; happy endings—a little bit wistful, a little bit hard-earned—are his state religion.
Of the many projects Curtis has become associated with it’s a surprise, maybe, to learn that he is billed for both writing and directing credits on only three of them: the now-canonized (or depending on your tolerance for holiday whimsy, unkillable) Love Actually, a randy little 2009 music dramedy called Pirate Radio, and 2013’s About Time, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this week. About Time was a modest hit upon release, earning just over $88 million on a $12 million budget; most of his better-known works dwarf those numbers. There is no toothy Julia Roberts or dapper, bumbling Grant to sell the movie’s ramshackle magic realism and hardly an iota of science in its time-travel storyline. The script is as intractably British as a tea cozy, and the coda shamelessly sentimental.
And yet it is somehow still one of Curtis’s most winning movies: loopy, tender-hearted, full of unexpected emotional resonance. (If you’re interested, it also features several slo-mo shots of a pre-fame Margot Robbie playing lawn tennis in a crop top.) Domhnall Gleason, then probably best known for being the son of veteran Irish character actor Brendan Gleason and a bit player in the Harry Potter franchise, stars as the gangly ginger lawyer-in-training Tim Lake—"too tall, too skinny, too orange"—who lives with his mildly eccentric family by the sea in Cornwall. On his 21st birthday, his affable, bookish father (Bill Nighy) lets him in on a secret: The Lake men, when they come of age, can travel through time. Not without limits; they can’t go back and kill Hitler or shag Helen of Troy. But with a little analog effort (a small dark room, concentration, clenched fists) they’re able to leapfrog through their own personal histories, recasting awkward conversations or diverting embarrassing gaffes and maybe even saving lives.
That’s all theoretical to Tim, whose screaming hormones surge towards one singular goal: girls. So when he meets an American beauty named Mary (Rachel McAdams) at a lights-out dinner party in London and gets her number via ordinary-mortal means, he is triumphant. And when an unrelated incident (it involves a favor to a friend) inadvertently erases her from his phone, he has to use every trick in his time-jump arsenal to find her again and put their shared destiny back on track.
This is the part where you might be asking, didn’t McAdams already make this movie? Kind of, yes, in 2009: a leaden melodrama called The Time Traveler’s Wife, and just trust that it is mostly terrible. Curtis moves more briskly here, duly reuniting his would-be couple and tracing their blossoming romance through a series of do-overs and déja vus. (When they have sex for the “first” time, Tim allows himself at least three replays; if at first you don’t succeed, etc.). Gleason’s hapless hero is far more charming than any man that close to resembling a human carrot has any right to be, and McAdams is consistently luminous, imbuing her line readings with a depth that the script’s scattered characterization—She reads books for a living! She really loves Kate Moss!—only spottily allows.
Vanessa Kirby, several years away from her star-making turns as Princess Margaret on The Crown and the White Widow in Mission Impossible, is bitchily pitch-perfect as Mary’s dubious friend (“she’s basically a prostitute”), and Tom Holland, most recently one of the gays trying to murder Jennifer Coolidge on White Lotus, is great as the dyspeptic middle-aged playwright Tim rooms with in London. Robbie, in her brief time on screen as an unrequited lust object, shows golden glints of the Barbie magic to come. But the movie’s best weapon might be Nighy, a longtime member of Curtis’s stable (his libertine rock star in Love Actually remains a pelvic-thrusting touchstone) who finally earned a long-overdue Oscar nod for his turn in last year’s gentle end-of-life drama Living.
The actor’s elegant stork-like presence and gnomic pronouncements about life and liberty form the emotional core of the movie, and, playing against Gleason, possibly its deepest, truest (albeit platonic) love story. The lessons here—that even the most ordinary moment is precious, and love is all that matters in the end—are hardly new nor particularly subtle; Curtis is a man with a velvet sledgehammer he doesn’t mind banging again and again. But it works because he works it, and even the distinct lack of smartphones and other millennial tech on screen feels like a balm. Already that era is definitively gone, but for two hours at least you can step into your own small dark space and disappear: About Time awaits patiently in the cloud, streaming on multiple platforms.
Watch on Amazon Watch on Apple TV
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