Time On Your Hands
by Stacy Phay
New Zealand native Andrew Niccol brings us into a world where time is quite literally, money. In his world everyone’s clock begins ticking backward at the age of 25. The poor must work every day, hour by hour, to build up their time bank, sometimes living off borrowed time, while the rich live off an abundance of time.
Justin Timberlake stars as Will, who is living in one of the poorest “time zones,” Dayton, just getting by and working hard to live another day. Like most ghettos Dayton has its share of crime, with gangs of “Minute Men” who steal time by overpowering unsuspecting citizens and literally draining their body clock (a device they are born with, located in the forearm). And where there’s crime, there are certainly people who fight it, those that are called to protect are “Timekeepers.”
While heading home from work one evening he saves a man from the Minute Men who are trying to steal his time, and in return the stranger bestows on him more time than Will even knows what to do with. Head Timekeeper Leon (Cillian Murphy) mistakes Will for a murder when the man is found dead, and the pursuit of a lifetime ensues.
Now that Will is able to do so, he ventures into one of the richest neighborhoods, New Greenwich, to see how the better half live, finding that because of their over abundance of time, they really, don’t. It is there that he figures out what his calling is. To stop the misuse of time and give the poor what they need of it. In an act of desperation Will kidnaps rich girl Sylvia, but their relationship quickly turns from criminal/victim to partners-in-crime.
Within the world of “In Time” Andrew Niccol set forth the precedence that aging stops at 25. Living, that is a whole other story, but your body never ages past 25 years old. Therefore the director and his producers were faced with trying to find actors who could pull off “old souls in a young person’s body” type roles. They felt immediate attraction, as we all would, to Justin Timberlake, who’s been working since he was 12. The fact that he has quite literally grown up in the spotlight has given Justin the air of being well beyond his years.
Justin jumped at the chance to play Will. “When I was a kid, some of my favorite movies were action pieces like First Blood, The Fugitive, and Die Hard,” says Timberlake. “The one thing I loved about those specific movies was that the protagonists were everyday people placed into extraordinary circumstances and doing extraordinary things.” “Will has grown up with essentially nothing,” Timberlake notes. “He wakes up every day and goes to work to stay alive. Through a series of events, he decides that he’s not going to take it anymore, and takes it upon himself to try and change the way things work in this world.”
Once they had their main character in place, the producers had to seek out his on screen love interest, who not only needed to be able to pull of the old soul persona, but who was charged with being the catalyst for Will’s need to fight for what was right. That job went to Amanda Seyfried, who’s star has been rising in big ways since playing a ditzy blonde mean girl.
Amanda said about her role: “Sylvia dreads her life every day, she wants to have some kind of adventure. In a world like this, you spend so much time trying to protect your life that you don’t really end up living. Everybody has bodyguards. They all eat very well, but very little, they don’t drink or smoke; it’s mundane. Sylvia just isn’t made for this kind of life. She gets her wish for a different life when Will takes her away.”
Every “hero” on film needs a nemesis, and as it turns out in “In Time,” Will has two. First, he’s on the run from Timekeeper Leon, played by the ultra-talented Cillian Murphy, who showed us his major range as the creepy Scarecrow in “Batman Begins” and the multi-millionaire target of the ultimate-dream-infiltration in “Inception.”
Cillian enjoyed the layers of his character, Leon “What’s great about the character is that he is a contradiction, because he’s actually from that same ghetto where Will lives. Deep down, he knows that it’s a corrupt system, and yet he’s decided to accept that and pursue his goal of keeping time. He’s a very kinetic and focused character, and for him it’s just about constantly moving forward. I think he’s suppressed all of his past. What I liked about the writing is that Will and Leon, they’re the flip side of each other. It’s just different paths having been taken. This is the path he’s chosen, and he suppresses all of the misgivings and issues he has with this system. He’s tried to leave them behind over the course of his life.”
When Will goes into New Greenwich, he is immediately affronted by Phillipe Weiss, Sylvia’s father and owner of one of the top time banks, which the poor living in Will’s city of Dayton are constantly borrowing from, and therefore owing to. Once Will goes on the run with Sylvia, and vows to begin handing out free time to the poor in his hometown, Phillipe becomes a second nemesis. Playing the role of Phillipe is “Mad Men” star Vincent Kartheiser.
Rounding out the cast are Olivia Wilde, who plays Will’s mother Rachel. In reality the actress is actually younger than her onscreen son, but as with the set up of time in the film, she is actually well over 100 years old, internally. Matt Bomer plays the stranger whom Will saves from the Minute Men, while Alex Pettyfer plays the head of the gang. Playing Will’s best friend Borel is Johnny Galecki.
"In Time" opens in theaters October 28. Check out the official site here