About Time

     Everyone has guilty pleasures. After all, not everyone can curate the perfect, cool, mysterious persona they want to have if they keep engaging with media and activities that don't fit in with the kind of person they want to be perceived as. For many, this manifests in some nerdy activity, like Dungeons & Dragons, or watching anime, or working on a niche hobby. Personally, my guilty pleasure has always been watching certain movies that I normally would never watch- typically romantic comedies.

    I don't have a massive problem with romantic comedies in general- I just think that they tend to follow a predictable formula that leads to the same movies playing out in different settings and with different actors, over and over. Plenty of people like these movies, but I typically get bored or feel like I'm "better" for acting like I'm above watching some generic romance movie. However, this can change occasionally when I'm alone.

    Sometimes, if nobody is free to do anything in Tallahassee and none of my friends can get on a videogame, I sit down, get some chips and hummus, and watch a movie by myself. These movies can vary by genre, like last week I watched the documentary My Octopus Teacher, which I'd recommend. But last night, I decided to rewatch About Time, a romantic comedy that I've seen a couple of times before, yet I find myself continuously returning to. What sets this romantic comedy movie aside from the others, however, is that the main character Tim can use time travel, leading to all sorts of shenanigans as he hops around the timeline trying to curate the perfect love life.

    As fun as this idea for a movie is, I did often find myself criticizing aspects of the movie to justify watching a romance movie to myself. Silly, I know, but I always want to have a reason to watch movies, especially when these movies aren't something I'd normally watch. It's easy to criticize this movie for its depiction of women as people without any narrative agency, since the only people who have the time travel power in Tim's family are the men, not women, and the people that Tim tends to manipulate most during his time travels are all women that he seeks to either sleep with or otherwise manage their lives.

    As such, this movie tends to leave a *meh* impression on me after every viewing. I don't typically think of myself as the type to watch a movie with a fixation on the treatment of women in it, but it was always an issue that bugged me. Still, I kept coming back to rewatch the movie every few months for some inexplicable reason. And finally, on this viewing, I think I understood why, though this doesn't invalidate my earlier critiques about the female characters in the film.

    At its core, About Time is a love story, yes, but its not between the people you think. Sure, the poster features Tim and his love interest, Mary, but really, this isn't about romantic love. It's about familial love. Specifically, between Tim and his father (played by one of my top actors, Bill Nighy) and Tim and his younger sister, albeit to a lesser extent.

    As two men who share the power to travel through time, Tim and his father's dynamic is very important and trustful, but I like that the film depicted the two as already very close prior to the reveal of Tim's powers. They joke together, play ping pong together, and overall have a very solid relationship, which grounds the two characters and makes them very likeable. However, by the end of the film, our understanding of the father's character has shifted with the knowledge that he could time travel too. Spoilers ahead!

    The main bulk of the story focuses on Tim's romance with Mary, but for the last third of the film, the focus shifts to the concept of mortality, as the father is revealed to have cancer with very little time left. Naturally, he is aware of this, as he has time traveled to the point of his death and back, but this contextualizes his own incentive to time travel. For Tim, it has always been about finding love, but for the father, he has spent every moment possible spending time with his family, retiring early once he knows that he will die, and through this you understand how much his family means to him.

    With this context, every scene with him beforehand is given new purpose, and new life. Every joke he makes, and every game of ping pong played with his son, is done with the knowledge that he has limited life left, and instead of doing anything else, he chooses to enjoy the small moments with his family. Tim, when faced with his father's death, does everything he can to stay with him, talking with him through time travel after his passing, showing that their bond transcends death. But eventually, he must let him go (for some other time travel reasons), resulting in one of the few scenes in any movie or show that I've watched that makes me tear up.

    Before moving on and accepting that they won't be able to time travel to talk anymore, Tim's father requests one last moment together, and they both time travel to when Tim was a small boy, and they play on the beach together. It's a beautiful scene that evokes my own memories with my Dad when I was younger, and it makes me think of what memories I would choose to revisit with him if we could time travel together. Beautiful, beautiful scene that I would recommend to anyone watching.

    So, I think that's why I keep rewatching this film every now and then. Yes, it is a funny movie and it does involve time travel as a cool narrative device, but at its core, its a story about the bond between father and son, and how each one of them values the other so much. I relate to this concept deeply as I love my Dad very much, and especially now that I live away in college, hours away from him, I am a little more emotionally prone to these sorts of father-son movies since I miss him. Overall great movie, and I cannot recommend watching this movie enough if you're interested in this familial love dynamic!