Film review: About Time

Imagine what you might do if you could time travel. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because film classics – the Back to the Futures and Groundhog Day – illustrate perfectly what you would do: get rich betting on forthcoming sports results and try to seduce someone you fancy. So what can west London luvvy Richard Curtis, king of saccharine, the man who cast Hugh Grant as the British prime minister, add to the theme in his new rom-com? A whole heap of sentiment is what.

Slightly shy and awkward, young Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) is just like you and me, except his marvelous upper-class family lives in a huge mansion, he has a very high-paying job and is very well connected, like everybody else that Richard Curtis knows. On top of all these advantages he can also travel back in time, he is told one day by his wonderful, warm, witty dad (Bill Nighy), allowing him to go back to situations where he messed up and do it all better.

Unlike most of us, Tim doesn’t decide to get rich betting on sports fixtures (he doesn’t need to – he’s already got a lucrative law career and a huge mansion in Cornwall), but instead tries to get the girl of his dreams (Rachel McAdams) to date him by knowing what she’s going to do and say and pretending to have the same opinions. Like Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day but not as funny.

Time passes, things get a bit serious, and Tim learns that really, life is about appreciating the little things, like stopping to smile at the poor prole who works in Pret a Manger when you’re on your lunch break from your high-paying and satisfying lawyer’s job. Then, just like in Curtis’s Love, Actually, the credits are preceded by heart-warming clips of other Londoners – including some ethnic minority and working-class people to confirm how liberal and inclusive everybody is – teaching us that life can have its small joys even if you don’t have a rich, loving family, a mansion, a perfect spouse and a successful, lucrative career, like Richard Curtis and all his friends.

Ugh. It should be loathsome. It should be hackneyed, clichéd, cloying and have audiences vomiting in the aisles. And it sort of is, but at the same time it is just so darned effective.

Yes, it’s not a patch on the wry Groundhog Day or exuberant Back to the Future, but the early scenes, with diffident Tim (the Hugh Grant/Colin Firth proxy) sneakily improving on his hapless romantic endeavors are comical and well scripted. There are the quirky supporting characters of the kind that people Four Weddings and a Funeral (which Curtis scripted). Nighy is as charismatic as ever and cameos from Richard E Grant among others add touches of class.

So much as you might want to watch impassively or laugh scornfully at the massive plot holes and roll your eyes at the unrelenting sentiment with which Richard Curtis is bashing you over the head, resistance is futile. The Notting Hill schmaltz-meister is going to get you.