About Time review: If Richard Curtis is brilliant at anything, it’s Upper Middle Class Lifestyle Porn

The easiest thing would be to sneer at Richard Curtis’s new film About Time, and so I will a little, or maybe significantly. It’s hard to know at this point, as I’m up here, at the beginning, and the end is down there, at the bottom, and who knows what will happen in between. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you. However, pre-sneering, in whatever amount, I should make clear that if you have enjoyed Curtis’s previous films— Four Weddings, Love, Actually, Notting Hill, but not The Boat That Rocked, which we’ll pretend never happened, as that’s best all round — you will enjoy this. It’s more of the same, pretty much, as our bumbling hero searches for love, bumblingly. It’s sweet (she says, sneeringly) but, try as I might, and I did try, I just could not find it interesting or affecting, in any way.

The film opens in a gorgeous, huge, rambling pink house by the sea in Cornwall. (If Curtis is brilliant at one thing it is Upper Middle Class Lifestyle Porn). It is home to Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), and his father (Bill Nighy) and his mother (Lindsay Duncan), and his sister, Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), and their Uncle D (Richard Cordery). Gleeson,  it merits saying,  is actually fantastic at playing what he is called upon to play, which is Hugh Grant now Hugh Grant is too old to play Hugh Grant. Bumble, bumble, awkward pause, bumble, bumble. You know the score.

Then one evening Tim, who has just turned 21, is summoned by his father, who tells him the men in the family have the ability to travel through time. There are certain rules, which are rushed through, probably so we don’t think about them too hard, which would be a mistake.