I need to admit to having a fondness for Richard Curtis movies: I repeatedly enjoy 'Four Weddings and a Funeral', 'Notting Hill' and 'Love Actually'. Curtis makes the art of the romantic comedy look easy, slight, and very simple cinema (even though countless, especially American, rom-coms prove this to be untrue).
And he is at it again in 'About Time'.
Right from the off, many of his typical tropes are apparent: the expository voiceover, the wonderful Bill Nighy, a rather hapless and bumbling hero (the very engaging Domhnall Gleeson before he became the utterly different, fascistic General Hux in Star Wars 7), a saxophone-playing Ben Castle, and an American female star (Rachel McAdams this time replacing Andi MacDowell, Julia Roberts and Laura Linney).
McAdams pulls off the everywoman - more Linney than MacDowell and Roberts. Likeable, funny, unselfishly willing to share the screen, this is further proof of her talent. She and Gleeson work effortlessly together when cohabiting scenes.
I love Bill Nighy in this film. He ticks all the right rather paradoxically quirky yet somehow also ordinary boxes. His portrayal makes it very easy to see why the film's important father-son bond is so strong.
As Gleeson's Tim moves through life, like all of us, his priorities evolve. Due to the film's central device for creating narrative tension (no plot-spoilers here, watch it to find out what it is), critically he ends up wanting to experience the world in a very different way to that he had expected. This will resonate for so many of us.
As in other Curtis creations, these central turns are all well supported. Lydia Wilson (Tim's sister: a creative, injured soul), Lindsay Duncan (one of those down-to-earth mummsy Mums), Richard Cordery (a marvellously disconnected Uncle), and Tom Hollander (a frustrated, bitter playwright divorcee) all provide their own moments of humour and contemplation about life's mores. Some of the script's best lines are uttered by these characters.
It is overlong at 2 hours; some of the middle material could be lost with no ill effect. It therefore feels as though it indulges itself rather too much in arising from its bed, yawning, stretching and then putting on its dressing gown in anticipation of the downhill stretch that is its poignant, emotional ending.
Not quite as good as the 3 above-mentioned films, but a lot better than many other recent rom-com efforts with which Hollywood has tried to entice us.