Let us speak of Andrew Niccol, who was born in Paraparaumu, New Zealand and was (I assume) an imaginative child, forever coming up with outlandish sci-fi concepts. ‘What if your whole life was really a TV show, and you didn’t know it?’ I imagine 10-year-old Andrew saying. ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ replied Mrs. Niccol while fixing a dish of smoked puffin, or whatever they do in Paraparaumu, New Zealand – but Andrew had the last laugh, writing the script for The Truman Show (expanding on that life-as-TV idea) then becoming a writer-director in his own right.
What makes Andrew tick? Again, we can only speculate – but I suspect his mind is still whirring with those what-if scenarios, possibly sparked off by the most innocuous encounters. ‘Time is money!’ says a random person, and Andrew Niccol takes out his notebook; ‘What if time really WAS money?’ he scribbles down – and that becomes the basis for In Time, a fiendishly clever sci-fi concept resulting in a patchy sci-fi action thriller. The setting’s the thing, a world where time is the main currency. “Let me give you 30 minutes, so you can have a decent lunch,” says our hero’s mother. A cup of coffee costs four minutes. A hooker, surreally, charges an hour for 10 minutes. “I don’t have time,” complains Will (Justin Timberlake) when he’s broke – but a suicidal stranger gives him over a century, along with a note reading “Don’t waste my time”.
This is more than just a gimmick – or rather yes, it’s a gimmick, but a resonant one, made to tie in with the current anger over “Darwinian capitalism”. Time appears on the characters’ forearms in this world; everyone’s genetically engineered to stop ageing when they turn 25 – at which point a clock kicks in, giving them an extra year to live, but that time is malleable and transferable. “My year was gone in a day, we were so in debt,” recalls Will, who’s been (literally) living day-to-day ever since. “My dad gave me a decade to celebrate,” says Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), the scion of a rich family – and that’s the point, that the world is brutally segregated between rich and poor. “For a few to be immortal, many must die,” is the secret behind the System, the privileged few hoarding thousands of years while the ‘99 per cent’ kill each other for a few precious minutes.
This is great stuff, and genuinely incendiary. Once you convert Euros and cents into hours and minutes, it does seem unfair that some should have so much while others have so little (what do the rich want with thousands of years, anyway?). The recession has crept into lots of Hollywood movies this year, from Bridesmaids to last week’s Tower Heist – but this may be the first one to suggest that a market-based system is wrong in itself.
Yet the film lacks something, whether passion or just follow-through; the whole thing seems very conceptual. Niccol wastes energy in cute little jokes, like a rich man introducing his mother-in-law, his wife and his daughter – they all look the same, of course – and a rather irrelevant message about the importance of taking risks (a variation of this appeared in Gattaca (1997), his previous foray into futuristic sci-fi, so it may be something of a personal philosophy). The rich are so terrified of dying by mistake, forfeiting immortality through some foolish accident, that they don’t do anything dangerous, buying sports cars just to put them on display: “The poor die, the rich don’t live,” scoffs Sylvia – and is instantly taken with Will, who drives at top speed and carries her back to the ghetto for a bit of Bonnie and Clyde.
In Time is more fun to read about – and tell your friends about – than actually watch. Will’s rise from ghetto to penthouse is thrilling, but once Niccol has him in New Greenwich (the most exclusive “time zone”), he doesn’t know what to do with him. The Javert-like pursuing “Timekeeper” played by Cillian Murphy is a thin character, his blind allegiance to the System more a useful dramatic device – otherwise Will’s story would be over too quickly – than a fully-explained trait (nor is it clear why he’s so unshakeably convinced that Will is a killer). Once our hero turns Robin Hood, the script deflates; “He’s hurting the very people he’s trying to help,” claims Sylvia’s dad, but it’s not clear if the film agrees with that. The last half-hour is mostly a drag, with one scene (the arm wrestling) that’s actively silly.
In Time is a muddled film with a glorious concept. You can feel Niccol’s glee as he stayed up all night (I’m speculating again) fleshing out the details – but his is a specialised talent. His mind is adept at what-if scenarios, not the nuts and bolts of dramatic plotting. At least it got him out of Paraparaumu, New Zealand.
DIRECTED BY Andrew Niccol
STARRING Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy
US 2011 109 mins
