Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/31/11
In
my lifetime, I’ve seen a fundamental shift in the way the poor and middle
class regard wealth. When I was growing up in the 80’s, the images
you saw of the rich and famous on TV were mostly of out-of-touch arrogance
(the word “snooty” isn’t really in use anymore) to which the average person
would not aspire, dreams of becoming rich tended to revolve around acts
of pure luck involving lotteries and the Publisher’s Clearing House contest,
and no one drempt of becoming “famous”, only of becoming “a star” (a key
distinction that involves the star actually providing the world with something
that justifies their fame). But over the years, 500-channel TV provided
more venues for empty fame and a much more in-depth look at the appealing
nature of the conspicuous consumption of the rich and famous. The
masses were sold pyramid schemes of investment in everything from collectibles
to real estate and soon enough every single American (yours truly included)
saw an end game in which they too would be rich and/or famous. This,
of course, was the perfect time for those who actually had the money to
take the clamps of decency off: since everyone was planning to be
rich, no one would object to anything that allowed the individual to amass
as much money as they could through any means necessary. Too bad
only those who already had money were in a position to profit, and while
the poor have always been a delivery system of wealth to the rich, what
happened during the last few years of housing bubble bursting and Wall
Street bailouts was a redistribution of wealth from middle class to wealthy
so rapid and powerful we could actually feel the money being sucked out
of our pockets. This has led to assorted political movements that
allow people to vent their spleen for a little while before being co-opted
by the very wealthy political parties they think they’re railing against
and, more usefully, Andrew Niccol’s new movie In Time. While
not in the league of James McTiegue’s classic V
for Vendetta as a film, it is very much its equal as an anarchist rabble-rouser.
Niccol restates the hard realities of the Post-Capitalist Oligarchy in
which we live as a stark, brute force sci-fi allegory he then spends a
hair over 100 minutes pitting a pair of do-gooder Bonnie and Clyde heroes
against. Niccol’s really thought out the logistics of his “time is
money” future and the metaphor is the star here, but he’s assembled a strong,
able cast and staged just enough quality action sequences to keep the less
mad as hell viewers in the audience engaged. In Time is very
much a movie of its moment, and I strongly recommend occupying your local
theater to give it a look.
It’s
The Future, long enough after a total conquest of the poor by the rich
that people like Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) don’t know when, how or
why it happened: everyone is born genetically hard-wired to not age
past 25. They have light-up digital clocks in their arms showing
how much “time” they have, a clock that starts ticking at one year upon
turning 25 and must be constantly replenished, because should it reach
zero, the person dies. Time is Money, and people must surrender minutes,
hours, days, months and years to buy the things they need to live.
Time can be given willingly or taken by force (the person with the “upper
hand” in any hand shake can syphon money from the other). This world
is divided into “Time Zones”, which cost more and more to pass between
ensuring the poor can never mix with the rich in places like New Greenwich,
where only the most wealthy reside. Instead, people like Will and
his mother Rachel (Olivia Wilde) literally live day to day, and each morning
he wakes up with less than a day on his arm, needing to work hard and do
whatever it takes to earn a day worth of money to live again tomorrow.
One night, he has a chance meeting with Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), who’s
looking for trouble in a bar where the century he has on his arm makes
him a sure target for gangsters like Fortis (Alex Pettyfer). Will
helps him to escape, but Henry, who’s walked the Earth for 105 empty years,
really wanted to die. He explains the pyramid scheme to his rescuer:
there’s only a finite amount of resources in the world, so when the rich
discovered how to live forever, they imposed the clock on the poor to keep
the population under control. As he says, “for a few to be immortal,
many must die.” As they’re hold up in a warehouse waiting out the
gangsters, Henry slips all but his final five minutes to the sleeping Will,
then crosses the street and falls to his death from an overpass.
Will is overjoyed at his sudden affluence: he can finally take his
mother to live in luxury. But corporate greed costs her her final
seconds before Will can give her the news, and he sets out on his own journey
to New Greenwich, where he meets one of the world’s richest men, Philippe
Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) and his rebellious daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried),
who is immediately attracted to the man who walks like he doesn’t have
forever to get where he’s going. But the police of this future, called
Timekeepers, are very much concerned with any transfer of wealth, and Raymond
Leon (Cillian Murphy) shows up on Weis’ door to take back Henry’s time
and arrest Will. He grabs Sylvia and escapes, and over the next few
days, she becomes more and more involved as Will discovers the secret of
his father’s death and a family legacy that involves the redistribution
of time. If the wealthy have stolen the years of a genetically engineered
underclass, is it really stealing to take them back?
Uh,
no: supporters of the 9-9-9 flat tax scheme are going to feel mighty
uncomfortable as In Time lays out its agenda. This is a movie
that wears its outrage on its sleeve like a ticking digital clock and doesn’t
invite debate. The “time is money” metaphor on which it’s built is
among the best ever mounted in a political sci-fi movie, and Niccol has
done a great job devising a world that’s come to accept it as the simple
nature of the universe. The poor do a lot of running and never sleep
in, while the rich don’t just take their time, they make caution a way
of life, surrounded by bodyguards and never engaging in crazy actions like
swimming or driving that could prematurely end lives guaranteed by their
bank accounts to go on forever. Just as his script for The Truman
Show foresaw our exploding fascination with watching Reality on television,
here Niccol understands all too well the dynamics of society, where the
poor are pitted against each other with ease in a competition to be that
one person who escapes their circumstances and crime among the rich is
treated like the abomination it is while among the poor, it’s a useful
distraction that keeps the underclass at each other’s throats and away
from doing that all-important math that asks just why it’s OK for the few
to have so much they’ll never need.
This
isn’t one of those movies content to lay out a dystopian future and let
us say “there but for the grace of God…”; no, In Time is a movie
that wants to grab The Man by the throat and kick his ass. While
the logistics of Will and Sylvia’s fight against Big Time are sometimes
hard to pin down because we can only see so much of the whole, the specifics
are pretty nifty. As long as The Man can keep driving up prices,
charging two seconds for every one our heroes give away, it seems an impossible
fight. But who doesn’t like the idea that a couple of resourceful
rebels can find a way to bring down an evil State, and while I didn’t always
follow the specifics of Will and Sylvia’s attempts to redistribute the
clock, I certainly did enjoy them.
In
Time is a key movie in Justin Timberlake’s fast-rising acting career
because it allows the former pop superstar to, for the first time, play
One of Us, and he’s really good. You can certainly see the wear of
a lifetime spent literally working for a living, and the charisma that
made him a star also makes him a great rallying point for a revolution.
Seyfried makes a solid Bonnie to his Clyde: she’s clearly been waiting
all her life to make some trouble and it’s amusing how quickly she jumps
on board Will’s violent bandwagon. Murphy is unusually and effectively
subdued in what may or may not be the Tommy Lee Jones role: both
he on screen and Niccol on the page play a nice game with our post-Fugitive
expectation that the determined detective investigating a case that’s not
all it seems must inevitably come around to the hero’s side. Kartheiser
does a very nice job with a challenging role, both looking far younger
than his real-life 32 and seeming like a far older man; a convincing captain
of industry and father of an adult daughter. Wilde also succeeds
at being a convincing older woman in a younger body, and the scenes where
she runs for her life as time runs out are absolutely heartbreaking.
And Pettyfer makes a wonderfully odious gangster.
There
are a couple of well-staged action sequences (any car chase where the hero’s
driving backwards gets extra points in my book), but the focus here is
mostly on, as Leon keeps saying, following the time. In Time
isn’t a movie likely to win a lot of fans in the highest tax brackets,
but it might just open a few eyes to the way the politics of wealth work.
Let’s be honest, unless you’re one of that top one percent, cinematic class
warfare rocks. |
