It Does Keep On Slipping

As a director, Andrew Niccol has a very specific style. he creates sci-fi settings that feel airy and cold. That's not a ding against his storytelling style; often his films are about exploring some kind of dystopian setting so that the human condition of now can have a mirror shown on itself. Gattaca, a cold and dystopian thriller from 1997, might not have been financially successful but it was critically praised and helped to put the director on the map. He then followed that film with The Truman Show, another film that, from a certain angle, seemed pretty dystopian as it ridiculed the very concept of always on, always connected reality television. Niccol has a specific kind of story he likes to tell.

2011's In Time feels, in many ways, like a companion to Gattaca. A dystopian setting, cold and airy, with people fighting every step of the way to improve their life in any way all while the rich stare down for their ivory towers and get richer and richer. It has all the elements you expect from Niccol's storytelling, coupled with an intriguing sci-fi conceit: what if the time of your life was also the currency you used to get by. Need a coffee? That'll be four minutes off your life. Want more time? Go get a job, or a loan, and find ways to keep yourself alive longer. It's cool in theory, the only problem is that the film struggles to match its interesting concept against a story that really works and makes sense. But then, often Niccol's films have that problem, too.

The film follows Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), a guy from poorest "time zone", stuck in the slums just scraping to get by with his mother, Rachel (Olivia Wilde). Both have been 25 for years, he for three, her for 25, as the genetic engineering all humans have gone through keeps them trapped at 25 forever. Immortal... so long as there's still time on their arms. Living is a one day at a time activity, always working to scrape up more time to stay alive. But a chance encounter with a rich guy slumming in a low time zone sets Will on a new course in his life.

That rich guy, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), has over a hundred years on his arms (when most people in the slums have barely a day), and he's tired of living. He gifts his time to Will, telling him to not waste it, before killing himself. Will runs to share his newfound wealth with his mother, but he's just seconds too late getting to her, watching her die in his arms with no time left. He heads to the richest time zone to live it up and see how the other half lives, but when his time is taken from his by the future's version of police, the Time Keepers, Will realizes the whole system is rigged. He takes rich girl Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried) hostage, and the two end up on the run, realizing there's no escape, and no changing things, without tearing the whole time system down to its foundation.

Up front, the concept of people living on their own time is interesting. One, it allows for the concept of immortality to just loom there, in the background of the story, the whole time. That's interesting. But it also puts into a very real concept the idea of living moment to moment, paycheck to paycheck. People talk in the film about "finding time," about how they "just need a little more time", and there's something blunt but poetic about how literal the film makes the whole idea. I do like that, in a way.

With that said, it is also very blunt. Having literal time also be the currency of the day means that the characters have to talk about their time all the time. Any talk about the future, about their lives, is also put into cold hard numbers. "I have this many days left so how do I plan past that?" Hopes and dreams don't seem to matter because the film doesn't really have any concern for it. Very rarely do characters do something simply because they want to. There no (haha) time for that in the film.

That is, of course, an issue I've noticed in Niccol's films, like Gattaca. and Anon: the sci-fi concept is more important to the film than the characters. The director is clearly very interested in all the implications for how a society like this would function at a fundamental level. How do people buy things? How do they gain time? How do they set time aside for later? But when it comes to the characters actually working and roaming and living in this society, the director feels disconnected from the material.

Take Will, for example. We're told a lot about him, how he's been 25 for three years, how he lives with his mother and cares for her, how his father was a time fighter who died one day. None of these things are explicitly shown to us, mind you. The chemistry with Olivia Wilde as his mother is there, a light familial bond that almost works. But, by and large, key details about his character are told to us as cold facts with little time give to actually see, understand, and process the material. Hell, even when his mother dies, Will almost immediately moves on and she's never mentioned again. She's a character detail that's unimportant the second she's off screen.

Sylvia is even less fleshed out than that, mind you. She's a blank slate, a cypher, this rich girl who gives Will pretty eyes and then gets sucked along on his journey. When she decides to run with him, it's hard to know what her real motivation may be or what she's betraying the society that made her rich and famous. Yes, she's just the daughter of someone even higher up in the social power structure, Vincent Kartheiser's Philippe Weis, and we're told that she hates the power he has over her... but again, that's just told. None of the emotion or reasoning for it is actually conveyed by the characters' actions before Sylvia decides, "fuck society, let's blow it all up."

The fact that the film works as well as it does at all is entirely a credit to the lead actors, Timberlake and Seyfried. Of course, Niccol lucked out here, getting to of the more charismatic actors of their generation to star in the film. Seyfried, of course, can sell raw sex appeal and dark charisma like few other actresses (just go watch her play the mousy, nerdy Needy in Jennifer's Body and watch her transition into a demon-powered heroine. That's her acting prowess. And Timberlake, famously, brought sexy back. He's a solid actor when given good material, and can sell a lot with his smile and his own charisma.

I wouldn't say the film wastes its actors or its concept. It's just that it doesn't really know how to connect either. Everything, like in many Niccol films, feels empty and airy in the movie. You're forced to accept a lot on face value because the movie doesn't really want to show you or inform you of anything outside it's weird sci-fi concept. You have to take stuff on faith and just roll with each new development because the film doesn't have time to let you adjust or even understand it on an emotional level. "Keep up," it's saying. "Don't waste time."

Despite all this, though, I actually kind of like In Time. It's a weird movie, yes, but it's sci-fi concept is nearly strong enough to carry the film on its own. Powered by strong actors doing all they can to sell the weird material, the film connects just enough to bring your through to the end. It could have been better, for sure, with a little more character development and more time spent actually helping you connect with the material. But it still managed to find an audience with me and with others, making $174 Mil against it's $40 mil budget. Not gangbusters, no, but enough to call it a qualified success.

If you go to watch In Time you have to accept it for what it is: weird, airy, disconnected at times. But there's a good thread of a film in here and that's enough to suck me along. I've watched the film three times so far and I expect at some point I will watch it again. It's a strange beast and I struggle to say just what I find so compelling about it's conceit. But then, that seems like the perfect way to describe just about every Niccol film. So, that tracks. In Time, for better and worse, is a very Niccol film and you just have to go in knowing that.