Movies about time travel often include some variation on if not all of these tropes: the theory that “time is not a fixed thing,” people lamenting their past, escapism, and eccentric nuttiness often mistaken for insanity. For good measure, Safety Not Guaranteed dabbles in all of these. These tropes don’t necessarily bog down the movie, but it makes the movie all-too-familiar. In the end, it’s sweet and cute, adequate in its brevity, but, overall, a mishmash of fantastical angst.
We begin with Darius, a brooding young woman mired in interndom for a Seattle newspaper. Here, along with her cartoonishly abusive boss, we meet Jeff, a man who is equally cartoonish in his juvenile philandering, and Arnau, painfully shy, virginal intern. Around a table of journalists contemplating the upcoming issue, a bit of information comes to light: a man is looking for a companion to travel back in time, encouraging this partner to bring weapons (I’m unsure what weapons are necessitated by 1991, but I digress), and emphasizing that SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.
Clearly, this must be investigated, because what’s more amusing that a man who might be off his rocker?
And thus, the three stereotypical characters stereotypically investigate. In truth, Arnau and Darius investigate by staking out the post office. Jeff has his own mission: to figuratively travel back in time by reliving his youth with a former girlfriend. Because he too regrets decisions he has made in his past. Darius’ regret is genuinely sad, so I’ll avoid spoiling it or mocking it, but it shouldn’t be a surprise given her high-school-emo cum better-dressed-emo adult nature.
The film progresses like you assume it will. There’s a charm in Kenneth (the prospective time traveler) despite his eccentricities and his tendency teeter toward unhinged. There’s a sweetness in his belief in time travel, and there’s an earnestness in the way that he fawns over his former crush, Belinda – whose life may or may not have been aided by the use of time travel.
In the film’s defense, it doesn’t dig too deeply in the rhetoric – cinematic or otherwise – of time travel, so there are no explanations or dangers that squishing a moth in 1991 will transform rain into acid chocolate pudding seep from trees. At the same time, time travel feels like the saccharine lollipop that a child receives to keep him or her from becoming annoyed. What I mean to suggest is that the “truth” in Kenneth’s existence is dangled in front of us, but it’s not really that fascinating either way, so time travel becomes something more fantastical that we might find more interesting than the actual lives of the characters. Jeff falls on his face as we assume he will (while somehow becoming coherently philosophical despite chugging a bottle or two of liquor on his own). Arnau loses his virginity to a girl whose parents might be able to press charges, and Darius finds the person who understands her: Kenneth – the guy that no one understands.
There are also government agents following Kenneth, only to let him do what he’s going to do when they would probably want to arrest him for stealing a wealth of government technology.
I suppose there’s something to be admired about a film that balances the sweet and the sad, successes and failures, as well as the mundane with the thrilling. I’m just not sure that these all belong in an 85 minute film that is supposed to span three or four days. It’s one thing to show glimpses of variations in people’s lives. It’s another to throw them together, hope they work, and assume the audience will be more overcome by the cloying sentimentality of the ending, so much so that they forget about the cliché narrative.