Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today I was thinking about 'About Time'.
While I was writing last month’s Mind of Merc post, it reminded me of another Richard Curtis film with slightly problematic messaging – About Time.
I really wanted to like this film – I’m a Whovian so I like time travel, I like (most of) Richard Curtis’s work, I like love stories – it seemed like a win-win.
The film has a good cast, promising premise, and I loved the bit about the actor forgetting his lines and Tim’s improvisation to fix it.
However, the issue I had – which I cannot get past – is after Tim and Mary have had a baby girl and his sister gets into a car crash. Tim goes back in time to prevent this but this means his baby girl becomes a baby boy. Tim apparently can’t cope with his child being different to how he remembers so he goes back again and allows his sister’s crash to happen so that he gets his first baby back. Now that, for me, is seriously twisted. It says he would rather his sister get hurt than his child look different. To take it further, it could be said he would rather his sister be seriously injured and potentially die just so his child doesn’t change gender. See the problem?
The rest of the film has some lovely messaging about appreciating your family/those around you and learning to accept you can’t hold on forever but where was that when he chose his sister ending up in hospital just so he wouldn’t have to look at a different face in the morning at the breakfast table?
(It could also be said that the whole premise is to manipulate women but let’s go with the less creepy interpretation of second chances and correcting mistakes.)
