Richard Curtis has spent a career selling the same promise: that a decent man, a well-timed apology and the right woman will fix everything. About Time hands him a literal machine for the job. Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim Lake, a young man who learns the men in his family can travel back to moments they have already lived. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2013, runs 123 minutes, and grossed $87.1 million against a $12 million budget. It is dedicated to Richard Griffiths, who died a few months before release; he appears uncredited as a stage actor in a play, his final film role.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures UK.
Cornwall, a New Year’s Party, and the Family Secret
The night after another bad New Year’s Eve party, Tim’s father James, played by Bill Nighy, tells him the men of the family can travel back in time to moments they have lived before. They cannot change history. They can change what happens and has happened in their own lives.
Tim tests it immediately, returning to the previous night’s party to fix a few events. James warns him against using the gift for money or fame, citing the boredom felt by other family members who tried. Tim decides to use it on his love life instead.
That is the whole engine of About Time, and it is a small one. The film is not interested in paradoxes, consequences or the ethics of rewriting a person’s past. It is interested in whether Tim can get a girlfriend.
Charlotte, Harry, and the Rules That Keep Shifting
The following summer, Kit Kat’s friend Charlotte, played by Margot Robbie, visits. Tim is instantly smitten and waits until her last day to say so. She tells him he should have told her earlier. He travels back to tell her in the middle of the holiday; she suggests he wait until her last day. He realises she is uninterested and that time travel cannot change anyone’s mind.
Tim moves to London to become a lawyer, initially living with his father’s acquaintance Harry, a playwright played by Tom Hollander. At a Dans le Noir restaurant he meets Mary, an American who works for a publisher, played by Rachel McAdams. They flirt in the darkness and she gives him her phone number.
Then Harry’s play opens and an actor forgets his lines, ruining the night. Tim goes back to help the actor, and the play becomes a triumph. When Tim tries to call Mary, he finds that the evening with her never happened, so he has no number.
He recalls her obsession with Kate Moss and attends a Kate Moss exhibition every day until he sees her. She has never met him, is confused, but lets him join her and her friend.
The rules here are already soft. The film sets them up and then bends them whenever a hug is required.
The rules and limitations of Tim’s gift aren’t exactly hard and fast, and the final third of the film is rife with complications that never get quite explained.
That is Kate Erbland of Film School Rejects, and she is describing the film’s central weakness rather than a minor snag. Megan Gibson, writing in Time magazine, said science fiction fans would be put off by “gaping time-travel plot-holes,” noting that James’s rules get broken repeatedly. Mark Kermode agreed that Curtis “sets up his rules of temporal engagement, only to break them willy-nilly whenever the prospect of an extra hug rears its head.”
The Cast, and What Each Performer Is Asked to Do
Gleeson plays Tim, and he carries the film with an affability that never quite becomes a personality. Nighy plays the father, and does the thing Nighy does well enough that the father-son scenes land harder than anything around them. McAdams plays Mary, who is given charm and little else; she exists to be met, lost and met again.
Robbie plays Charlotte, a plot device with a suntan. She shows up, declines Tim, and exits so the film can move on. The screenplay treats her as a lesson rather than a person, and the lesson is thin.
Around them the film fills out a family and a London circle: Lydia Wilson as Kit Kat, Lindsay Duncan as Mum, Richard Cordery as Uncle D, Joshua McGuire as Rory, Will Merrick as Jay, Vanessa Kirby as Joanna, and Tom Hughes as Jimmy Kincade. None of them gets enough room to become more than a name.
A Time-Travel Film That Does Not Want to Think About Time Travel
The plot holes are not incidental. They are the film’s method. About Time wants the emotional payoff of a second chance without paying for the logic of one, and Curtis is willing to break his own mechanics to get there.
Other critics made the same case. Steve Cummins of the Irish Post called the film “riddled with plot holes,” Matthew Turner of View London described an “unsightly pile-up of plot holes and logic problems,” and Nicholas Barber of The Independent called the explanation of time travel “shockingly inadequate,” adding that “Curtis keeps leaving questions unanswered – time and time again.”
The film’s defenders would say the mechanics do not matter, that About Time is a romance wearing science fiction as a costume. That argument would hold if the mechanics were not doing the emotional work. They are. Every major turn in Tim’s life is produced by a trip backward, which means every turn is produced by a rule the film reserves the right to ignore.
What the Film Almost Says About Money and Fame
There is a real idea buried here. James’s warning that money and fame brought other family members only boredom is the most interesting thing in the screenplay, and the film mostly drops it. A version of About Time that took that warning seriously, that asked what a person owes the life he keeps editing, would be worth 123 minutes. This one mentions it and moves on to the Kate Moss exhibition.
The film is dedicated to Richard Griffiths, who died a few months before its release. Richard E. Grant also makes an uncredited appearance as a stage actor in Harry’s play. Griffiths’s final film role is a small one, and it is a reminder that the movie around him never quite earns the sentiment it keeps reaching for.
About Time is not a bad film. It is a soft one. It asks the audience to feel something about a life Tim keeps revising, and it never makes the case that the revised life is the one worth having. The tagline asks what if every moment in life came with a second chance. The honest answer the film gives is: you would use it to get a girlfriend, then use it again when that goes wrong, and the film would not hold you to account for either.
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