American philosopher Benjamin Franklin famously observed that time is money. Centuries later, 2011’s In Time proved that aphorism’s enduring wisdom by creating a fantastical world where its inverse — money is time — ruled the land. Andrew Niccol, a filmmaker best known for penning dystopias that played on emerging anxieties around genetic modification (Gattaca) and reality television (The Truman Show), attempted to strike the sweet spot between timeless and timely. What he ended up with was a movie both ahead of and behind the times in its treatment of socioeconomic inequality.
In the imagined 2169 of Niccol’s In Time, time has literally become humanity’s currency. Bodies stop aging at 25, at which point the clock on their arms starts ticking down from the one year left in their lifespan. The poor struggle to extend their lifespans, while the privileged accumulate decades of excess time. In his initial world-building exposition, Niccol demonstrates how the undue burdens placed on working people under such cruelly capitalistic arrangements prevent them from ever getting ahead. In the real world of 2026, The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey fittingly dubbed these procedural pains “the time tax.”
The central metaphor concretizes the hidden costs of poverty that can often feel intangible when described in abstract. The struggle for survival of Justin Timberlake’s factory worker Will Salas is more than just a matter of money — it’s life. He tries to piece together enough time to support his family, but it takes nothing short of a miracle when Will intervenes to rescue a man he later learns is a centenarian. After confessing the mechanisms of the corrupt, price-fixing cabal of elites in New Greenwich, the prosperous Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) bequeaths all his remaining time to his scrappy savior.
Yet these newfound riches hardly vault Will into the upper crust of society. He’s quickly sniffed out as an impostor among the New Greenwich types when he breaches their segregated spaces. Financial bigwigs like Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) presume the only way an ordinary laborer like Will could come into so much time is to swindle or steal it. His rejection, despite the big numbers on his arm, exposes a hole in the mythology of social mobility. Wealth is not a tool to bring people into their ranks; it’s a means to keep people out of them.
In Time does begin to fall apart as it moves from concept to execution, however. Niccol’s work is not some misbegotten masterpiece worthy of critical re-evaluation. The film’s flaws remain as evident and enraging as they were a decade-and-a-half ago. His writing here takes cleverness to the point of cringe with all its wordplay on “time.” The regions in this world? “Time zones.” (Will hails from “Dayton,” get it?) The cops? “Timekeepers.” It’s likely no coincidence that Andrew Niccol’s most enduring work, The Truman Show, was one that he handed over for another director to interpret.
The self-satisfied glibness undermines the very thoughtful critique of class and capitalism. Niccol is as likely to have heiress Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried) drop a truth bomb like, “The poor die, and the rich don’t live,” as he is to have Will quip, “You don’t generally sleep in,” when explaining the leisure habits of the economically disadvantaged. By the time the story takes a turn toward Bonnie and Clyde, with Will and Sylvia robbing “time banks” to redistribute funds, the whole enterprise starts to feel like sociological frameworks in search of a story to tell inside of them.
By the time In Time goes Bonnie and Clyde, its premise starts to fall apart.
In Time is a work caught between currents in cinema as peak TV was ascendant and audience interest in original theatrical movies was waning. The cast alone captures such an oddly calibrated selection of actors from different parts of an industry in transition, from rising TV stars (Kartheiser, Bomer, Olivia Wilde) to supporting players whose potential had yet to be fully realized (Seyfried, Cillian Murphy). And, of course, there’s Justin Timberlake at the peak of Hollywood’s conviction that he could be a true double-threat. His inability to shed the white-boy swag of his music stardom means that Will is never believable as a working-class striver with a chip on his shoulder or fire in his belly.
But the more unfortunate accident of timing is that In Time came out too early in America’s reawakening to issues of economic inequality. The film hit theaters at the tail end of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park, the first in a line of major political events in the 2010s to reframe America’s understanding of class consciousness. This coincidental juxtaposition against a burgeoning populist movement gave Niccol’s film a relevance on which it was unprepared to capitalize. This was a canary in the coal mine for the many studio films that could not harness the momentum of then-current events, be it as obliquely as The Dark Knight Rises or as directly as Elysium.
Now that the country possesses a greater shared vocabulary around the root of the problems in an exploitative and stratified system, perhaps the moment has arrived to try and make something out of In Time’s compelling conceit in a new format. It’s exactly the type of project that would benefit from a remake or reimagining. Not because it was perfect right out of the gate, but because it might be made perfect with a little more time for the ideas to ripen and mature.
