13) About Time (2013)
When Richard Curtis revealed that his next movie was going to involve time-travel, no-one was very sure what to think. Curtis is reliably excellent at making movies that showcase the terribly British characteristic of conveying a lot, whilst doing very little. That is, Curtis’ movies are funny without trying (Four Weddings and a Funeral), deeply emotional without relying on overly dramatic storylines (Notting Hill), moving in often the most surprising of ways (Bridget Jones’ Diary), and above all – extremely real (Love Actually).
They certainly don’t feature story devices that are from other genres, or – worse – that are actually impossible to assimilate into real life. It was difficult to equate Curtis with this new direction. Also, Rachel McAdams had already played a time-traveller’s wife (in, fittingly enough, The Time Traveller’s Wife), and it hardly looked like the sort of experience that she would want to live over again. For McAdams – and ever-dependables Bill Nighy, Lindsay Duncan and Tom Hollander – to have agreed to the project, it could only be assumed that there was something very particular about it indeed, and that Curtis knew what he was doing. There was – and he did.
Not only was the time-travel aspect itself handled surprisingly realistically, About Time is also possibly Curtis’ most beautiful film. It is certainly his saddest – the scenes following the death of Tim’s father, and the last day that they spend together (on the beach, having travelled back to when Tim was a little boy) both needing to come with the health warning that once watched, there is a distinct chance that you will be crying forever.
But it is also his most uplifting. As the movie comes to a close, Tim’s voice over informs us that as life has gone on, he has stopped travelling back in time altogether. “I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day,” he says, “to enjoy it as if it was the full, final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.” A montage of scenes from “ordinary life” then plays out, against the music and lyrics of Ben Folds’ unbearably gorgeous song The Luckiest: Having a lie in, feeding the children, waving them off at school, people playing games, laughing at a book, catching a few moments in the sun, kissing, doing the weekly shop, talking, dancing, working – all of daily, familiar, routine human life is here…and it is glorious.
In the end then, About Time isn’t actually a time-travel movie at all. It simply describes the realization that we don’t actually need more time in order to make the most of our lives – and that all we have to do is make the most of the time that we do have.
That, as it turns out, is all that Time is About.