About Time

Time travel here has no machine and no budget line: a dark cupboard, clenched fists, no visual effect worth the name. Richard Curtis described the result as a kind of anti time travel picture, which is fair warning that nobody on screen will ever explain the rules properly or treat a paradox as a threat. The structural oddity is worth knowing before you start. The courtship of Tim and Mary is settled around the midpoint, and the remaining hour belongs to Tim and his father, so the emotional peak arrives after the genre you bought a ticket for has quietly ended. Curtis also replays single scenes two or three times with small corrections, a device that lands as a joke early and as an argument late, and one that wears on anyone who wants a story to keep moving. Production notes give the scale. The budget was twelve million dollars. Zooey Deschanel was in talks for Mary before Rachel McAdams took the part, and Porthpean House in Cornwall stands in for the family home. Curtis said at the time that this would probably be the last film he directed. The strangest fact about the picture is commercial rather than artistic: South Korea outgrossed the United States and Canada combined, which is not the shape a British romantic comedy usually takes.