Dad’s handiest advice to Tim is to simply live each day twice, first to experience it, and then again to savor it.
(It’s interesting that every time-travel-themed love story, from Chris Marker’s masterful “La Jetee” and “Back to the Future” to this, is haunted by death and loss, no matter how comedic the register.)Īcceptance indeed reps the takeaway message in a film that touchingly celebrates life’s quotidian joys, like playing Ping-Pong with your son, rereading books or even enjoying supposed disasters, like a wedding during a torrential downpour (a swooningly romantic montage, albeit in a film with a few too many montages). Still, in his efforts to save Kit Kat from trauma, Tim learns there are some events that can’t be changed without unraveling others.
But if audiences can put that aside, the script takes pains to depict Tim as the ultimate loving husband and father, willing to exploit his gift in order to perfect his bedroom technique, milk every moment of joy out of his children’s growth, and protect his loved ones from harm. Unlike McAdams’ titular character in “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Mary is never privy to her significant other’s handy secret, which might make some viewers a little uncomfortable about the fundamental lack of honesty in their relationship. Eventually he tracks her down at a party, and the rest is essentially one long happy ending. They spark, but when Tim realizes he was supposed to be somewhere else that night, going back in time to fix the gaffe blows his chances of meeting Mary, and so he must find another way to engineer their “first” encounter. Learning from his failed attempts to bed fickle Charlotte ( Margot Robbie) that some things just aren’t meant to be, Tim moves to London to start his career as a lawyer, setting up digs at the home of caustic, embittered playwright Harry ( Tom Hollander).Īt a restaurant where diners eat in pitch-black darkness (London’s Dans le Noir, getting some ace product placement), Tim has a meet-cute with Mary (McAdams), a publisher’s reader from the States.
Tim soon puts his newfound skill to use, as any 21-year-old would, by nullifying embarrassing moments and courting girls. (The upshot, as Tim’s dad points out, is you can’t do anything like kill Hitler.)
It’s some kind of genetic gift that requires nothing more high-tech than concentration, clenched fists and a darkened room, more like the “Slaughterhouse-Five” kind of time travel where you can revisit any moment from your own life, rather than the mechanically assisted H.G. The action begins in a rambling seaside mansion in Cornwall, the home of protagonist Tim (fast-rising thesp Domhnall Gleeson who, along with Damian Lewis, is doing much to promote the sex appeal of red-haired men) and his retired academic dad ( Bill Nighy) his gardening-mad mother, Mary ( Lindsay Duncan, hilariously described at one point as an Andy Warhol lookalike) his ditsy younger sister, Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) and his sweet but mentally challenged Uncle D (Richard Cordery), ticking the disability-awareness box required in every Curtis movie.Įndearingly maladroit in the manner of early Hugh Grant characters, Tim learns a secret from his dad on his 21st birthday: The men in their family are capable of time travel.