What if you watched a movie about time travel that never had anyone go back in time? Probably wouldn’t be all that fun, right? Well, maybe in any other movie, but with director Colin Trevorrow‘s wonderfully light and often emotional comedy drama Safety Not Guaranteed, that’s what we get, a genuinely honest and clever story that sets up all the reasons why someone would need to jump back in time but never takes them there. Or rather, us.
We meet Darius Britt (Audrey Plaza), a young woman with a lot of potential but sort of stuck in a rut that she can’t seem to wriggle free of. She’s smart, witty, skeptical, and filled with questions, but can’t find a place in life to make that work for herself. She’s interning at a magazine, barely even seen, but ends up picked up by Jeff Schwensen (Jake Johnson), a staff writer tasked with covering an odd story about someone who posted an ad for a partner to travel back in time.
That man is Kenneth Calloway (Mark Duplass), a guy on the peripheral who believes he’s found a way to return to the past, but needs help and materials. After Jeff fails to gain his trust, his mind actually on an old girlfriend (Jenica Bergere) he’s looking to hook up with again, Darius goes in, her uniquely dark attitude perfectly matched with his sort of desperate paranoia. She convinces him that she is for real and takes up the effort to fix mistakes done years before.
A breezy but unexpectedly weighty little movie, Safety Not Guaranteed is the very definition of a quirky indie comedy, you know, the one with heart and drama packed around the awkward laughs. Written by Derek Connolly, the film depends on our leap in accepting that a girl like Darius would end up the way she is, but it’s sold so well by Plaza and a story that keeps her exactly on the right path we stop seeing the movie for the way its packaged and more for how its consumed.
And it’s this path that while seemingly predictable from the start, is wobbly enough that it eventually bends to the point where she feels like a different person when it comes to the end. Yes, that’s the point of most stories, but in a film like this, one that might feel artificial in manipulating a character like Darius, it feels genuinely earned.
It’s because of this that a moment about an hour in works so well, one that is created and set up to be one thing but is really about something else. Sort of.
By this time, Darius has fully embedded herself in Kenneth’s mission, at first pretending to go along with his strange ideas of building a machine that be believes government agents are trying to stop. On the surface, he appears to be a little off center, nothing that he seems to do or say all that “normal.” He’s a gentle guy but is also a kind of survivalist, training in the woods behind his isolated home to shoot guns and practice martial arts. Darius keeps up with him and in a short time, has him believing she is a real partner in his venture.
Of course, we know she is actually working on article, but we get the sense that she is learning more about him than she thought possible, that despite his odd behavior, he is a good man with a tragic story. She follows him even into what potentially could be dangerous situations, her curiosity perhaps dangling the carrot but his disarming humanity keeping her hooked.
So, we eventually find them sitting around a nighttime campfire in a clearing near his house. Like usual, he is focused on the mission, again not seemingly noticing that a beautiful young woman is spending time with him, instead treating her like a kind of operational partner in preparing for what lies ahead. He’s never made a move on her, never said a word or made a gesture that would indicate he even sees her as a girl.
We know why, and so does she, the purpose for his going back to fight for a romance in his past, so when Darius sees the zither – a kind of neckless guitar – laying on the ground behind him, her interest peaks. He tells her that his father used to play it, and that he’s not that good, trying to write a song for the love he lost years ago he hopes to meet again. Darius asks him to play, which he hesitates to do at first but soon agrees.
He’s actually very accomplished on the instrument and sings a breathy love song he’s only half completed while Darius looks on, suddenly seeing him very differently, an evolution long in the making. It’s the very moment we know that she has truly fallen for him, a point where she cannot turn back, no matter the outlandish mission he claims they are about to be part of.
What works about this objectively clichéd moment is the raw sincerity its built around, the way Trevorrow stages this exactly as we expect it to be, only to have it feel brand new. Duplass, who excels at playing these kinds of characters, is sympathetically vulnerable as he strums the zither strings, even as he’s trying to show her how strong he is. He is actually singing a song called Big Machine by Ryan Miller, who wrote several for the film, and it tells of being caught in the crush of the real world and trying be different. These are words that while meant for a girl we have yet to know, strikes directly at the heart of a woman sitting right beside him.
Two things happen afterward, one that you not only expect will happen but would almost hate the film for if it didn’t follow through, and another that flips everything we know about Kenneth, putting the challenge of his adventure squarely on Darius’s shoulders. What will she do?
The campfire scene is crucial in that reveal because of how important what we learn means to where it will take Darius (and us). We have traveled with her from the start, seeing the limiting world she lives in prior to Kenneth and so needing to understand what about his mind would be so attractive in making a change. This is the success of Safety Not Guaranteed the title itself symbolic of the very nature of parting yourself from the trappings of not moving in a new direction. And that’s how a time travel movie with no time travel works.