James vs. His Future Self (2019)

Nerdy scientist James (Jonas Chernick) is so obsessed with striking a path towards a theory that would make time travel viable, he might as well be one of those self-centred assholes who are generally the lead characters in male-centric romantic comedies for all the difference it makes. Which is rather fitting, for this is indeed a romantic comedy. For, you see, James has somehow managed to acquire a best friend in form of scientist and colleague Courtney (Cleopatra Coleman). These two are of course the sort of friends who are actually “meant” to be in a romantic relationship, James is just too fixated on developing his theories to notice. To be fair, he clearly dreams of using time travel to save his parents from dying in an accident, so calling him egotistical wouldn’t be quite correct.

James is living with his sister Meredith (Tommie-Amber Pirie) right now, but it is only a question of time until she’ll have enough of mothering him while getting nothing back from him.

And wouldn’t you know it, one evening, an older man, let’s call him Jimmy (Daniel Stern), appears, telling James – and eventually convincing him too via the power of penis comparison – that he is James’s future self, using his own time travel invention to dissuade his younger self from turning into a lonely old man who lost all of his human relations to his scientific obsession, and thinks it’s a good idea to go back in time to fix things this way.

Young James is a difficult case, though.

Generally, male-centric romantic comedies with their fixation on asshole protagonists who are taught to be a little nicer and are then rewarded by this with a pretty new girlfriend are the least interesting part of the sub-genre to me. Too often, these guys are just too crappy human beings to actually care about their fate, and their changes tend to be so minimal and irrelevant, their redeemed state is still pretty low on the human being scale, which does not exactly suggest romance to me. Nor does these films’ tendency to treat their female characters as anything but prizes to gain improve matters on the romantic scale. Jeremy LaLonde’s James vs. His Future Self does rather better here.

It starts with James not actually being a total human wreck yet, but standing right on the cusp of it, still having understandable reasons for his flaws and a personality that actually seems worth saving even if you are not his future self. And Courtney, while not being an actual co-lead, does have a personality, agency, and a life of her own beyond being James’s love interest; why, the film even has her keep her own professional goals in the end, and it’s James who gives up on something that’s important to him. It’s also a rather clever move to also include the brother-sister relationship as more than a plot crutch or a source for snarky dialogue, relating James’s change to more than just his love life and suggesting that he’s actually improving other people’s lives with his change instead of only himself.

The film is often genuinely funny, with Stern’s interactions with basically anyone turning scenes that would be too pat and functional otherwise a bit less easy to foresee, and adding a degree of (still funny) pathos to proceedings James alone couldn’t provide, the time travel angle really adding to the film’s emotional resonance here.


Of course, you could argue that the film’s focus on James living “in the moment” instead of completely in his head, and the way it frames doing science and having a personal life as completely antithetical for him (but apparently not for Courtney) is really a bit too simple, but I don’t think it would improve as a romantic comedy if it got into this too deeply. And a romantic comedy, and a pretty good one, James vs. His Future Self is and wants to be.