Safety Not Guaranteed (15)

Safety Not Guaranteed – the debut feature from director Colin Trevorrow – is ostensibly a film about time travel, but is really a film about love and regret.  Its science-fictional trappings, although taken seriously as being central to the movie’s plot, thus serve as more of a sideshow to the human relationships which lie at the centre of the film.

Morose magazine intern Darius (Aubrey Plaza) finds herself on a road-trip to the seaside town of Ocean View with her boss Jeff (Jake Johnson) and painfully shy fellow intern Arnau (Karan Soni) to investigate a newspaper advert offering the opportunity to go back in time.  They assume that the advert’s author, a grocery store employee named Kenneth (Mark Duplass), is either a prankster or a madman, but when Darius poses as a volunteer time-traveller in order to get closer to the story, she begins to see a kindred spirit in Kenneth, whose anger and paranoia mask a deep-seated passion and intelligence.  Over the course of their stay in Ocean View, Darius begins to suspect that Kenneth, despite his eccentricities, might actually have been able to build a time machine, but more importantly that he is someone she might be able to connect to despite her own loneliness.

Safety Not Guaranteed has all the stylings of the so-called ‘mumblecore’ movement of indie films, featuring as it does eccentric characters, verbose dialogue, social awkwardness and irony by the truckload.  But it’s also a film with real heart; a romantic comedy that does justice to the term by being both warm and funny, with great performances from Plaza and Duplass in the main roles, and an impressively tragicomic turn from Johnson as a man who attempts his own version of time travel by trying to recapture the simpler pleasures of a lost youth.  Duplass’ Kenneth remains an enigma right up until the film’s final scenes, and even then the extent to which his genius might be madness is not completely clear.  But this doesn’t make the blossoming relationship between himself and Plaza’s Darius any less touching, or the film’s final shot any less poignant.

Regret and the overwhelming desire to fix one’s past mistakes are what motivate the characters in Safety Not Guaranteed to revisit their respective pasts, whether literally or figuratively.  The film’s emphasis on these aspects of human frailty mean that the time travel element is pushed to one side, but its sci-fi credentials are in evidence nonetheless.  Through its use of implication and suggestion, the film remains just open enough to interpretation to let the viewer decide whether Kenneth’s time machine works or not, and whether the incongruence between characters’ own versions of their pasts and the apparent truth is a product of their own deception, or of the world having imperceptibly changed around them.

At times, Safety Not Guaranteed seems comparable to time-travel movies like Rian Johnson’s Looper or Tony Scott’s Deja Vu, where what the viewer sees throughout the film is actually a number of different time-lines intersecting, with time itself depicted as fluid and ever-changing.  But to ruminate too much on the temporal mechanics of the story would be to rob it of its key strength and focus, namely an affecting portrayal of love and regret.  That is why Safety Not Guaranteed is a great romantic comedy, but it can still be a sci-fi film if you want it to be.