In Time

Occasionally a film’s success can be predicted by reading the front page of the newspaper, or by watching the national news.  Our insatiable need for stories ripped from current headlines is exemplified, not only at the box office, but also in the music we listen to, and the television shows we watch, both scripted and reality-based.  A much quicker progression from script to screen makes television the ideal medium for this, as last minute tweaking can maximize verisimilitude.  For films, taking sometimes a year or more to produce, they tend to paint a more general picture, broadening the strokes so much that many times all that remains is a mere riff on a currently popular belief.  In Time is a perfect example of such a film.  Benefiting immensely from a release date during the height of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and from production a year earlier, when economic woes were beginning to highlight the divide between the haves and have-nots as the issue of the moment, the film capitalizes immensely on the idea that money is the root of all evil, but plays it as safe as possible, never straying beyond a most blunt interpretation of the idea, and outright refusing to weave any of society’s complexities into its narrative.  In Time is nothing more than an aphorism in search of an ideology, a parable in search of a meaning, a self-congratulatory, myopic, and willfully insulting and misogynistic excuse for a film, and one of the most repellent examples of Hollywood at its most careless.

Set in the year 2161, genetics allows for people to stop aging at twenty-five, the trade-off being that they only have one more year to live.  At that age, a digital clock display appears on their wrists and a countdown begins, so they can virtually see every second tick past.  Money has been eliminated as a commodity, replaced by time itself, which is now salary at work and the price of a cup of coffee on break; citizens place their wrists under a glowing green light where time is either added or subtracted.  At this point it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the filmmakers show that time has become the new currency, from bus fare costing a few hours, to payday loan stores that deal in time, all in place of money.  Society is divided into zones, which costs an increasing increment of years and decades just to cross from one into the other, and of course our story begins in the poorest of zones, where everyone is living paycheck to paycheck, or day to day, one of the film’s many attempts at overt parallels to real life. 

Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, a factory worker who rescues a man with more than a century of time from a bar fight, and is rewarded with a confession that in the wealthiest zone there is more than enough time for everyone to be able to live forever.  He then tells Will that living forever is boring, gives him all his remaining time, and commits suicide before Will can stop him.  Armed, no pun intended, with more than a hundred years, Will decides to make a better life for himself and his mother.  But unfortunately that night, a bus driver refuses service to his mother because she does not have enough time to pay the fare, and it takes her just the amount of time she has left to run home, and in the film’s only clever scene, Will and his mom run toward each other as the seconds count down, expiring just close enough to him that she dies in his arms.  Angry at the way of the world, Will decides to cross over into the wealthiest zone and upset the balance that is constantly oppressing the people he lives among.  From this point the film is just a bunch of scenes from other, much better films.  Will gets chased by a Timekeeper, Cillian Murphy, the only actor who actually gives a performance in the film, who believes Will’s influx of time must have been stolen.  Will meets Weiss, a man with an infinity of time who happens to own the loan offices in the slum, and wins several hundred years from him in a poker game before kidnapping and holding hostage his daughter to escape capture by the Timekeeper.  He teaches her wonderfully enlightening things like how to hold a gun, and what it means to go hungry and of course she falls in love with him, and not only helps him elude the Timekeeper, but also rob time banks so they can spread the wealth around to everybody.

The glaring problem in all of this is the filmmakers’ inconsistent use of time as a commodity.  Half way through they hope we will forget how specifically they compared time to money, and instead view time as an abstract when Salas begins stealing it.  In Time draws all of its narrative direction from an idea of class warfare, and then proceeds to glorify it, while at the same time running amok with its own ideology.  We are meant to identify with Salas and Weiss’s daughter (a completely vacant Amanda Seyfried) as some sort of heroic Bonnie and Clyde, and rally behind their Robin Hood antics as they take time from the wealthy and disperse it amongst the population.  We are supposed to cheer them on despite the fact that if the same thing were to happen with all the money in the world the global economy would come to a grinding halt as everything would become worthless.  Much time is wasted in the film tracking down a single bracelet that holds one million years.  Weiss (a wasted Vincent Kartheiser, from Mad Men), a sorry excuse for a villain in a film that truly believes its audience will accept money as the ultimate bad guy, asks Salas if he gave one year to a million different people what purpose would it serve.  The screenplay is so one-note, so hell bent on seeing itself through that it doesn’t even bother to respond to such a perfectly salient and logical question.  More concerning is the fact that people are watching this and swallowing it whole. 

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, the man behind 1997’s brilliantly understated Gattaca, 1998’s critically acclaimed Truman Show, and a bunch of garbage since that has helped his career nosedive to rock bottom, finally achieves that with In Time.  Justin Timberlake, perfect in past roles that required him to lift weights shirtless in the background and let the occasional “what up?” fall from his lips, has in Will Salas his superstar breakthrough role, and he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.  Niccol is content to have him and Seyfried run around mugging for the camera, while delivering some of the most unbelievable lines of dialogue I’ve heard all year.  In fact, Timberlake’s reading of his lines makes it seem like the film was written by a twenty-something trust-fund-baby who is insecure around women and mad at his rich daddy for making him wait for his inheritance.  It is not enough to borrow Hollywood’s oft-used cliché of the Stockholm Syndrome to fill the screenplay’s gaps in developing the relationship between Salas and Weiss, character actions must still be germane to the story, and I submit that their roll in the hay, coming immediately after a random display of bravado on the part of Salas, and her subsequent googly eyes in his direction is much more indicative of the occasional reprehensible misogyny that plagues many contemporary Hollywood productions.  If there were any subtext in the film, any lines that required connecting in the audience’s mind, any complexity to the narrative, perhaps every aspect of this film would not be rendered so completely obvious.

In my head I hear a friend at the water cooler rolling his eyes and telling me that I should just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the film for what it is worth.  To that friend I would say In Time was worth exactly what I paid for it, the two hours of my life it robbed, and nothing more.  If only it were the year 2161, I could demand the two hours be added back on.  ZERO out of *****