Tale as Old as Time (Travel)
Rachel McAdams, please stop calling us. We love you, we worship you, but the role has already been cast. We get it, it’s one of the lead roles in a time travel romantic comedy… but you’ve already done that! It’s time to spread the love around! We love our lead actress and we’re not going to call you back, I’m so sorry.*
Rachel McAdams has not only acted in one film about time travel. She’s been in four films about time travel: About Time, Midnight in Paris, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Doctor Strange. But seriously, why does Rachel McAdams love doing time travel rom-coms? And why do we love watching them? Well, it’s all about nostalgia. And Rachel McAdams’s face, but I digress.
With this recent resurgence of romantic comedies, we’ve seen folks clamoring for more and more films that make us feel like we’re in the rom-coms of the 90s. And we loved the rom-coms of the 90s and early 2000s because they had the hijinks and banter of the Screwball Comedies of the 1930s. And the Screwball Comedies of the 1930s were adored because they had the physical comedy of Vaudeville, an incredibly beloved genre of theater that began in the 1890s. You can see where I’m going with this… Much like Owen Wilson’s character, Gil, said in Midnight in Paris when Marion Cotillard’s Adriana wanted to stay in the past: “If you stay here though, and this becomes your present then pretty soon you’ll start imagining another time was really your... You know, was really the golden time. Yeah, that’s what the present is. It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.”
What time travel romantic comedies also give us: the potential to be satisfied. If we can move through time, experience life, and then come back to where we are, maybe we can learn to just appreciate what’s in front of us - like Jenna with Matty in 13 Going on 30, or Nyles and Sarah in Palm Springs. By traveling through time in these films, we learn to live in the present, which was the exact lesson of the brilliant About Time, where sweetie time-traveler Domhnall Gleeson says, “And in the end I think I’ve learned the final lesson from my travels in time…The truth is I now don't travel back at all, not even for the day. I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.”
These stories provide us, and the characters, with the experience and time to learn. In Meet Cute’s latest series, In My Wedding Era, April is about to begrudgingly walk down the aisle to her longtime boyfriend, not because she doesn’t love him, but because she hates the archaic traditions of weddings. Suddenly, she finds herself traveling back in time, with her best friend Josh, who reveals that he’s a time-traveler. As the two travel through time and visit weddings in the Roman Empire, the Roaring 20s, and the free-loving 70s, April learns more about why we have weddings and what makes them special. Traveling through time gives April the gift of knowledge and reveals some unexpected truths about her own desires.
And after doing four time travel romantic comedies, you’d think Rachel McAdams would have experienced enough time travel to want to linger in the present for a bit. But maybe she just needs more time. As Meet Cute’s latest leading lady, April, says: “It took decades – no, literal centuries, for me to figure it out. But I’m so glad I finally did.”
*Rachel McAdams, you can call us anytime.
Listen to Part 3 of In My Wedding Era, wherever you get your podcasts.