About Time review

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2014)

Tim lives an ordinary and happy life with his odd family until his 21st birthday, when his father reveals to him that all the male descendants of the family are able to travel back in time through the events of their own time line. Tim will use this unexpected power to find the right girl with whom to spend the rest of his life. "About Time" has positively surprised me. Basically unknown in Italy, I admit that I've seen it just because I've read that there were time travels in the plot but, by the appearance of Tim's weird family I understood that I would have loved this movie: the "rectangular, busy, unsentimental" mother, the always available father, the "free spirit" sister, the impeccable uncle Desmond aren't so different from the relatives I use to know very well. The meeting and the life with Mary are maybe too perfect to seem real (yeah, I know, if you leave out the time travel thing) but fit in with the rest of the story. The last part of the movie was very touching: the farewell to Tim's father, the advices for a happy life and the walk on the beach (sure one of many for them), the very last glance at the past before move on with life. It is everyone's dream, to own the ability to travel through time, to go back and fix all those little (or big) imperfections of our lives that create embarrassment when you think about them, even after many years, and, let's face it, we don't like Tim at first because of his ability that makes his life perfect, while we, mere mortals, have to do the long way, without ever being able to see the consequences of our actions. But in the end we realize, as well as Tim, that we don't need to go back in time to be happy, but we have to live each day by focusing our attention on the good things rather than on those that went wrong, by remembering the good times and giving the right perspective to the bad ones.