What if you walked into an Apple Store not to purchase an iPhone or iPod, but to buy a digital implant that could count down the days until your soul mate arrived, then connect you with a charming chime?
That clever premise is explored with soapy fun in the indie sci-fi/romance flick Timer , premiering Friday in Los Angeles and May 14 in New York.
Written and directed by newcomer Jac Schaeffer, the movie asks some good questions about love in the time of technology, Twitter and too-much-information. The R-rated Timer is alternately hilarious and overly melodramatic as its eponymous gadget wrecks pretty much every life it touches.
But the film’s self-referential melodrama and convenient happy ending partially avoid deeper technocultural criticism in favor of warm fuzzies. Does it work? That depends on your date.
Things fall apart from the start, as Oona O’Leary, the neurotic orthodontist played by Caulfield, careens from one failed relationship to another, leaning too heavily on the Timer’s significance all the way. (Hers is blank, meaning that her soul mate hasn’t bought one yet.)
Meanwhile, Borth’s foul-mouthed and sexually promiscuous Steph barely cares about her own Timer, which is counting down not days but years until the love of her life will show up. Add it up and you’ve got a snarky half-sisterhood of sex jokes and broken hearts.
Once the man candy shows up in the form of Gossip Girl ‘s John Patrick Amedori and Dexter ‘s Desmond Harrington, Oona and Steph start to find their romantic grooves. But rather than facilitating romantic closure, the implants just keep screwing up the program.
Timer works best when it sticks to the comedic elements and strays from romance and psychological themes. Watching Oona’s poor teen brother get implanted at home in front of his too-ecstatic parents and relatives is a riot, especially when he finds out that he’s going to meet his soul mate in five days.
His mother, played by JoBeth Williams, is a bright spot of the film, possessed as she is by matchmaker madness. The film could have been better served by more such derangement and less drama.
In more introspective moments, Oona and Steph have a tendency to blow up their interpersonal dramas at the expense of those around them, which proves annoying. So does watching them fidget uncomfortably around their mother’s Latino maid, or lob callous jokes at the lonely elderly to exorcize their own demons.
Perhaps that cultural and emotional insensitivity is a byproduct of the technophilic setting of Timer — and our own real-life environment. Although the digital age has brought us tremendous connectivity, we remain ironically estranged from each other.
When Timer explores that technological irony, it’s a good-natured hoot with its heart and head in the right place.
WIRED Apple Store satire, tech fetishism, Michelle Borth.
TIRED Melrose Place melodrama, multicultural marginalization, happy ending.
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