ABOUT TIME

Let’s get the time travel reference out of the way first. I’d like to go back in time with a red pen and say ‘No!’ to a lot of Richard Curtis’s script, which stuffs words where they just don’t need to be stuffed. The good news is that if you cried buckets over Love Actually, you’ll go bananas for this.

Shortly after turning 21 and enduring New Year’s Eve, the awkwardly ginger Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) learns from his father (Bill Nighy, just about managing not to steal every scene) that the men in his family can travel back in time.

It’s mystifying that Tim doesn’t immediately look down at his ghastly sweater and go ‘Right, brilliant, I’ll go to Topman.’ Instead, he spends his time trying to find love in true Curtis fashion, or rather a girlfriend, which is not the same thing. After some false starts, and a burgeoning career as a lawyer, he meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), but has to try and win her all over again when he changes time and erases the meeting.

Domhnall Gleeson, when allowed to be his natural Irish self, is utterly charming. Poured into a Hugh Grant straitjacket, with an English accent stiff enough to prop up a society wedding invitation, it all goes a bit wrong. Tim, with his prurient devotion to correct grammar, comes across like someone rather nasty from one of the Dickens novels his father is always reading. He compliments girls on their eyes, face and hair, falls in love with ideals and looks, and given Curtis hasn’t written any of them a personality – Tim’s sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) is a hollow repetition of Four Weddings’ Scarlet – the girls are only allowed to be ciphers.

This is particularly annoying because McAdams possesses nuclear levels of charisma, but again is forced into a type that she wears too uncomfortably to be convincing. Mary’s only interest is a bizarre fascination with Kate Moss, and working her way up the publishing ladder by reading the slush pile. Even Four Weddings’ Carrie, of ‘Is it still raining?’ notoriety, had a personality, even if it was deeply annoying.

Still, Tim gets what he wants: a beautiful girl to live happily ever after with. Whether that’s what we want is another matter, so hurrah for a plot that bookends this unsatisfactory romance with a lovely exploration of a father-and-son relationship. Curtis slathers on sentiment as though About Time is the last scone on the plate, but in the case of the men it works.

There’s also plenty of lovely Britain to look at. Curtisland is on fine form, from a family pile in Cornwall, to the Londoners all living in gorgeous flats in Maida Vale and SW5, despite earning tiny salaries. The minor characters leap to the foreground with the usual mix of the furious, deranged and plain mad. Lindsay Duncan is wonderful as Tim’s no-nonsense mother.

The last third of the film is lovely, and likely to leave you both rosy with nostalgia for someone else’s life, and itching to go and mull over your own.