About Time: Can I Unsee This Film?

It started innocently enough: my first (and probably only) Bumble match wanted to show me his favorite movie, About Time. I’m a sucker for a good romcom but hadn’t seen it, and I suspected there was a reason I would watch the trailer on YouTube and opt for another film instead.

“I’m not sure I’m going to like it,” I told him.

“You don’t have to like it,” he said.

We curled up on the couch and pressed play. Two hours later, as the credits rolled, he asked what I thought.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“What did you really think?”

For starters, I said, I can suspend disbelief about time travel, but not at the Kate Moss subplot that predicates the characters falling in love.

The two main characters, Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) and Mary (Rachel McAdams), meet in a darkened restaurant (quite literally: Dans Le Noir is a concept restaurant where diners eat in total darkness) where Mary jokes that she looks like Kate Moss. Since they’ve never seen one another, one presumes the joke is underscored by the assumption that Kate Moss is the epitome of beauty, of what men want. It turns out Mary absolutely loves the supermodel, a fact which comes in handy when Tim has to go back in time to fix something and realizes he missed his Hollywood meet-cute at Dans Le Noir with Mary.

Since it wouldn’t be a romcom without a Hollywood meet-again-cute, he suddenly realizes there’s an exhibit of Kate Moss photographs by Mario Testino that same day. How convenient! “Friday, I’m in Love” by The Cure plays in the background as he waits, sort of stalker-like, ignoring the photos of Kate Moss and half-ignoring his sister. Tim and Mary meet (again) and they talk (again), and it’s cringey because Mary has no recollection of Tim because they’ve technically never met (because… time travel).

It’s slightly confusing, but less so than Mary’s obsession with Moss. When Tim lies and says, “I’m just Kate Moss’s number one male fan,” Mary lights up.

“Really?” She asks. “Do you agree that the magic of her lies in her history? That the informality of her early shots compared to this stuff, so you just always know that, despite the high fashion, she’s still just that cheeky, normal, naked girl on the beach?”

He agrees with that “profoundly,” but I’m not sure there’s anything profound about it. Any model’s early shots could be categorized as “informal,” because you’re usually not shooting high fashion from day one (unless you’re Lila Moss).

Perhaps the interaction would be easy to dismiss if it didn’t come up again, when Tim must go back in time (again), to re-meet Mary (again). In this meet-again-again-cute, he blurts, “Let’s talk about Kate Moss.” Surprised, she says she loves Kate Moss. He continues, pilfering words from her unknowing mouth, “I always think the key thing with her is the history. The informality of her early shots, compared to high fashion stuff, so you always know that underneath she’s still just the same cheeky, normal girl, naked on the beach.”

Mary nods and smiles and says, “Beach. I agree with you completely.”

A lie jumpstarts their entire relationship, and at no point in the rest of the narrative does he reveal it was a lie. Kate Moss conveniently never comes up ever again, despite a solid ten minutes of this mossy subplot.

Instead, we find out Mary is a “reader at a publisher” (read: literary and intelligent) with a cute, bookish appearance to match: acetate frame glasses, mousy brown hair with a self-cut fringe, prim yet sort of dowdy dresses. Her apartment is full of paisley tapestries, quilts, and books stacked beside an iron bed frame. As a reader at a publisher, it’s curious the screenwriter didn’t choose a literary figure for her to idolize. The ‘room of her own’ practically begs for a shout out to Virginia Woolf.

When I think of Kate Moss, I think of 90’s Calvin Klein, minimalist column dresses on waifish frames, and a bright, white apartment full of high fashion photographs ripped from glossy magazines. Nowhere in Mary’s life is there evidence of her love for Kate Moss, which we’re supposed to believe is so deep it propels her to build an entire life with this man who says he loves Kate Moss too.

It feels as though the male screenwriter asked himself, What do women like? and then arbitrarily chose a female supermodel to stand in for all of Mary’s interests, without actually asking how this character might be shaped by her love for Moss. The unbelievability of this Moss subplot is an extension of the one-dimensionality of all the film’s female characters: the wise mother, the quirky sister, the hot girl (played by none other than Margot Robbie).

After two hours, I can’t tell you what books Mary likes, or why she’s an American living in London, or whether she has more than just one friend (played by Vanessa Kirby). But I can tell you how she feels about her body: when Mary asks Tim to help her pick out a dress, and she laments feeling “lumpy” in a tight-fitting blue number; when discussing whether to have another child, she whines how she got “so fat” when she was pregnant.

Nowhere in the film (and in no time dimension) could Rachel McAdams be called “lumpy” or “fat.” Fat-shaming unfortunately echoes throughout screenwriter Richard Curtis’s films, like how Natalie is repeatedly called chubby in Love Actually. It’s handled slightly more elegantly in Notting Hill, where Julia Roberts, playing an actress, confesses she’s constantly on a diet — an admission that’s not a complaint how she feels about her body but meant to illustrate the pressure women in Hollywood are under to uphold unrealistic standards of beauty. The audience knows her actor boyfriend (played by Alec Baldwin) is a jerk when he tells her, “Don’t overdo it. I don’t want people saying, ‘There goes that famous actor with the big fat girlfriend.’”

About Time is unfortunately a bit patriarchal at its core: only the men in the family can time travel, a fact which could be easily addressed or questioned but goes unmentioned. And because they possess this superpower, the men can go back in time and alter the circumstances of a situation if the outcome with a woman doesn’t meet or exceed their expectations. Came off as a stalker? Go back in time and fix it! Bad in bed? Go back in time and fix it! Your sister is kind of a fuck up? Go back in time and fix her too!

Ultimately the film doesn’t know what it is; it’s more of a warmhearted father-son story mistakenly marketed and packaged as a romcom, while the very basis of the relationship it purports to focus on is a sham.

That’s what I really thought of the film. My date — let’s call him Ryan — thanked me for my honesty, and we had a good conversation about how some films have plot holes or problematic subplots, but there’s still something about them that allows you to suspend disbelief and escape for a few hours (that’s Notting Hill for me). I apologized for not liking it more and asked why it was his favorite.

His biggest anxiety was being publicly embarrassed, he said, so he liked the idea of going back in time and rewriting wrongs.

The next day, when I texted and asked how his day was, he said he felt “stoopid” for everything he said the night before, like every comment “dug a deeper hole of misogyny,” revealing his lack of knowledge of “how to be a good man and support women and feminism in general.” I was astounded at the discrepancies between our conversations; I couldn’t recall a single comment one might consider even remotely misogynist. We connected on the phone, and during the course of our two-hour conversation, Ryan said I was “intimidating,” and though me being “more intelligent” than him could be seen as a good thing, he admitted it bothered him. The conversation ended with him crying, for reasons I could not discern, and later, he texted, “sorry I freaked out tonight. I really enjoy our time together and value the conversations we have. It feels good to be around you. And it feels good to open up and be real.”

As good as it felt “to open up and be real,” I never saw Ryan after our screening of About Time. He ended things over text a week later, vaguely saying, “our triggers/traumas don’t work together” (huh?) and citing “communication” issues.

It was all very baffling. I had taken a year off from dating after a six-year relationship ended, and this was my first real attempt— during a pandemic, no less. Was this what dating was like now? (When I asked my therapist for her take, she said, “Wow, that spiraled quickly.”)

So I’m not joking when I say I wish I could go back in time and unsee About Time. I wish I were a redheaded British boy who could climb into a cabinet, squeeze my fists, and travel back to that Saturday in January when I had not yet watched the movie. When Ryan came over, I would’ve suggested we watch something else. Or better yet: I would’ve lied and pretended to love the movie in the same way Tim lied to Mary about how he loved Kate Moss.

But I am not a redheaded British boy with the ability to travel back in time, and I am not a very good liar. So I have to assume this was how things were meant to be. Men who are intimidated by women and can’t sustain a certain level of critical discourse without taking things personally are not men who will want to spend a lifetime with me. I’m unable to simply dislike something and leave it at that. Instead, I possess an annoying tendency to figure out why I dislike something, which often requires picking the thing apart to figure out how it works. This incessant reflex to critique things serves me well in my work as an editor, and such passion and intensity seems attractive early on in relationships. But men — the ones I’ve met, anyway — quickly tire of such unrelenting intensity, usually at the moment when they realize there’s no off switch.

Ryan liked About Time because it allowed the main character to go back and rewrite wrongs, to fix mistakes — his own and other people’s. But men get so many chances. They’re almost always the author of their own stories, rewriting the narrative as they see fit. Why did they also need to be the editors of other people’s stories?

Even if I could go back in time, things with Ryan were beyond the reparative powers of time travel. As I watched his favorite movie, I felt this gnawing realization that I didn’t want any of the events in the film to unfold between the two of us. I did not want him to propose to me in the way Tim proposes to Mary, did not want to marry him in a small church wearing a red dress, did not want to buy a house with him or have children with him. I suddenly wanted to live in a house in Cornwall by the sea, but he wasn’t who I wanted to sit beside in the sand, looking out at the water. It’s hard to cowrite a future with someone when you can’t envision them in yours.

Bonus Content: About Time has approximately 4.5 Stars out of over 6,000 ratings, which means I’m one of few who dislike the film, but I’m partial to this 1-Star Review on Amazon: “Why is everyone in this film so wealthy? Why are the average looking men in the movie all hooking up with ridiculously beautiful women? Oh hang on — it is because the men are super wealthy.”