About Time: Finding Love Through Time Travel

About Time is a movie written and directed by Richard Curtis. That one fact instantly determines whether or not you will like this movie. If, like me, you are in the pro-Curtis camp and willing to accept some treacly sentiment alongside the heartening charm, you will thoroughly enjoy About Time. If, however, you are one of the anti-Curtis zealots who come out of the woodwork every Christmas to pen lengthy diatribes about Love Actually, this is emphatically not the movie for you.

Still with me? Good. The movie features the very charming (and very ginger) Domhnall Gleeson as Tim, a man who is told on his 21st birthday that the men in his family have the ability to travel back in time. The purveyor of this information is Tim's dad, James, played by Bill Nighy who is twinkly, weird, and marvelous in this role. As evidenced by the fact that he mostly uses his time-traveling skill to have more time to read books, particularly Dickens. There's a man after my own heart. Young Tim, however, is slightly less preoccupied with the classics, so he uses his newfound ability to get a girlfriend. This doesn't go according to plan until he moves to London and meets Mary (the always resplendent Rachel McAdams).

Tim's initial meet-cute with Mary is delightful and the two share an instant connection. Unfortunately, due to a time-traveling mission Tim undertakes for a friend, he loses Mary's contact details, and even when he manages to track her down, she has lost all memory of him. What follows is a funny (more pragmatic folk might say "creepy") attempt to win her over again by some judicious time travel and stalking.

Tim and Mary's love story is sweet and Gleeson and McAdams share a wonderful chemistry. But the movie is also about Tim's love for his sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), and his deep love for his dad. Kit Kat is an elfin girl who gradually sinks under the weight of poor life decisions, and Tim discovers one of the hazards of time travel when he tries to fix her life for her. Then later, Tim has to face the harsh reality that time travel doesn't grant immortality and his time with his father is finite.

About Time is bittersweet and endearing, the hallmark of any Richard Curtis film. If you take your time-traveling tales very seriously, do NOT watch this movie, because the rules of time travel are very loosely constructed and contradicted as the plot demands. This isn't really a movie about time travel anyway but a movie about appreciating and loving life. So set aside your sarcasm, put the kettle on, and enjoy a simple story about a man and the people he loves.