The early 2000s were wild for almost everyone involved. Whether it was Susan Boyle positioned as a joke because of her looks, Benefits Britain prodding around poor people like zoo animals, or Tyra Banks borderline abusing her contestants into doing blackface, producers got away with murder. It’s only with hindsight that the insidious undercurrent of what was presented as normal becomes clear.
This is the context that I rewatched About Time (2013) in. I needed a tear-jerker and I had a fuzzy understanding that the film followed that exact vein of cosiness. But an hour in, the protagonist hadn’t come anywhere close to learning a heartbreaking lesson about what it really means to live life. Instead, he’d come much closer to acting out the misogynistic daydreams of a ten-year-old boy.
This is because the film is based on a similarly coercive premise to Groundhog Day (1993). The protagonist, Tim (Domhall Gleeson) can go back in time and change the past, most often to manipulate a woman to the point they find themselves convinced that he is delightful. It’s the patriarchy on steroids; the men in this movie control both women and time itself. Their power only passes down through the men in the family because what possible use could women have with it when they only exist to be fucked or saved? Father and son stand in the cupboard, both fists clenched, to travel back in time. No wonder Tim can’t get laid.
While good characterisation is slim on the ground when stereotypes are taken out of the mix, the romanticised construction of women in this movie is what grates the most. We have Tim’s sister, Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), a manic pixie dream girl figure who forgot to be likeable and is obsessed with the colour purple to a child-like degree. Tim sets himself on the task of fixing her depression by getting her a better boyfriend, apparently assuming that all female problems can be solved by male attention. Then we have Tim’s love interest Mary (Rachel McAdams), defined solely by her ability to charmingly laugh off his creepy and witless remarks, and an exceptionally good pair of bangs. One scene has her stripping off an item of clothing for every decision he makes about the wedding. It is obviously playful, but for the joint venture of their wedding to be reduced to only what he wants (and which is her duty to make him realise) and to sexually gratify him in one fell swoop really is something. There’s only so far the Englishman-so-innocently-flustered-by-sex trope can pull a film out of bad taste.
Women, then, are always understood through the lens of a man. Good actors like Bill Nighy and Margot Robbie wrestle with flabby lines that could well have been written by an alien whose only exposure to Earth was through teenage smut. It’s enough to make you query whether any of the scriptwriters had ever met a woman before. The only attempts at ‘good-natured’ humour are uncomfortable jokes about women’s sexuality that struggle to land. One, because the jokes are hypocritical (Tim is an interdimensional ginger slut) but two, because as a general rule, for something to be funny, the entire joke can’t be predicated on denigrating a social category’s position in society.
The film was released when rom-coms seemed to be breathing their last breath. In the wake of the release of Avatar in 2009, the film industry started to realise blockbuster audiences would reliably turn up in droves to a cinematic universe they had already invested in. Instead of the rom-com formula that had been chuntered out for twenty-plus years, production companies could take the same values of romance, patriarchy, and flat characters, place them in a CGI world and almost nothing would be lost. By the late 2000s, star-studded romcoms were almost always produced at a loss. Films like Easy A (2010) and 500 Days of Summer (2009) did well because they broke away from the form by being self-aware and smart but, About Time feels dated because it clings to the rigidity of what came before it.
But what pisses me off most about the film, is the fact that the ending is actually good. It’s a poignant reflection on grief, suffering, and learning to see the wealth of what you have in the present moment. Culling the first hour of the film would have done the story a world of good. The producers pull at the emotional puppet strings of the audience in order to forget the misogyny woven into the very fabric of the film.
The film emphasises the importance of living everyday as though we are coming back to live it again from the treasured perspective of knowing what it’s like to lose it. However, when the ‘now’ is laced with misogyny, it’s hard to do anything other than dream about a future of film where women and the way they are talked about feels fresh, and it feels believable. We’re all travelling in time together, Tim says in his closing monologue. It’s about time women got to do so too, this time outside of the long shadow of men.
